L'Appel du Vide
by Exulansist
Summary: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a woman, I put away childish things. Ten years later, Sarah revisits the labyrinth - or is it the labyrinth that revisits her?
1. Mirror

I'm wiser now.

Is that right?

I'm older now, certainly. Older and wiser, that's what they say.

Don't they?

But for the past ten years, there's been an alien wildness in me.

They say that in the presence of a god, one must only touch the hem of his clothing to be healed.

I don't remember touching anything that was explicitly his.

Is that strictly true? I can still hear the crooning of a song I'd long since forgotten in my deepest, most secret dreams.

I can't figure out which universes count. Which dreamscapes, if you will.

I haven't known where the line between real and imaginary lies, not for ten years. It's blurred beyond recognition. And where lines blur, they are easily crossed.

When his world went to pieces, I don't remember touching anything at all, but sometimes, when the moon hangs high and full in the night sky, I can feel the brush of a snow white feather along my cheek.

I haven't dreamt of anything but the Underground in ten years. Somehow, I haven't dreamt of him, either. I used to take comfort in it, but lately, the wildness is sprouting into restlessness, and when I reach back into myself to grasp it and pull it out by the roots, I find that I don't recognize the landscape of my own mind.

A labyrinth is growing, spiraling through my innermost self, and he, perhaps, the Minotaur.

Pacing.

* * *

It hadn't been quite two weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday when I started losing time. It took a few days for me to accept that this wasn't the same thing as simply daydreaming for a few minutes. Sometimes I woke up confused and disoriented and didn't know where I was.

My nighttimes turned into an unbroken expanse of darkness, which was a welcome change from the usual fitful sleep packed with vivid dreams, but my daylight hours sometimes seemed to be shrinking to a pinpoint. Some days, I lost more time than others.

Time, and temper.

By the third time that day, Jennifer, my roommate, dropped a hand on my shoulder to jog me awake, I snarled into her face.

She recoiled. "Sarah?"

I felt a conscious receding of something other, and felt the muscles in my face untwist themselves. "What?" I asked, concentrating on keeping my voice level and calm, fighting the terror that bubbled up, rancid within me.

"It's just - well, you've been sleepwalking at night lately, and I don't want to wake you then because I've heard it's very frightening for sleepwalkers, to be interrupted. But now there're these daytime trances." Her face was drawn and white, her entire posture defensive, curling in on itself. I must have gone whole-hog with the whole crazy eyes thing.

"Trances?" I parroted back at her, dumbly. A sharp pain in my thumb made me drop my confused gaze from her face to my hand. The fingernail was torn deep into the quick, oozing dark blood in a sharp line through the gash  
 _-rift-_  
in the nail.

"I wasn't going to say anything, but it's gotten worse really fast. You've been dropping off mid-sentence and just staring off into space."

"I must not be getting enough sleep," I offered, closing my injured thumb in my fist and rising from the chair at the table. But I couldn't remember why I was in the chair - we so rarely use the dining room table that it's become just another shelf, cluttered with piles of junk mail, books with creased spines and the occasional dirty plate that hasn't yet made it all the way to the sink.

Jen and I have lived together for two years and change, now, two young unprofessionals attempting to forge a path through an unfriendly world. We met while searching for roommates, discovering we'd been at the same college at the same time but had never crossed paths before we each needed someone to shoulder half of the rent.

She's moonlighting as a photographer, but her day job is as a secretary in a real estate firm.

My pipe dream, for as long as I can remember, has been to write, but outside of a few short freelance pieces, I haven't managed to pitch anything successfully. Apparently I fixate on the unfriendly in-between, the unsavory implications of childlike fantasy, the deep and dark that is left unsaid.

My last rejection wasn't couched in anything, which is all for the best, because I can't learn any lessons unless they're as blunt as possible.

 _Much too frightening for children. Not trendy for adults. Some of this made my head spin while I tried to read it. You aren't a bad writer, have a pretty good grasp of the craft - have you thought about repackaging it as horror and dropping the childhood adventure?_

 _Maybe concentrate on the friends: a coming of age journey? Leave out the unsettlingly sexual figure. Totally inappropriate._

I guess no one remembers the Brothers Grimm.

So during the day, I work for a florist. The pay isn't great, but there's something satisfying in caring for the small green tendrils, cultivating them into full, glorious bloom, and then snipping them off. An arrangement of fragrant, imminent death.

Jen dismissed it as morbid the one time I tried to articulate why I liked making a couple bucks more than minimum wage and coming home with dirt beneath my fingernails every day. I don't talk much about my innermost thoughts anymore.

Half the time, I don't recognize them anyway.

* * *

It's cliché to say that he came to me in my dreams, but that's exactly what happened the night after my birthday.

It wouldn't even be worth mentioning, except that I can't remember a dream that I've had, not ever, unless it involved the Escher room, empty and echoing, or the forest, filled with fiery creatures that pop off their extremities willy-nilly, or the long, unbroken halls of an overgrown, musty maze, or a fall, slowed only by hands sprouting from walls, that goes on forever and ever.

This is the same, but it is different.

For one thing, the infinite hallway that I find myself in looks like something from a child's understanding of the Palace of Versailles, the hall of mirrors, only instead of golden and flooded with light, it is almost pitch dark except for where I can see my reflection right in front of me.

The floor isn't carpeted, unless you consider the thick pad of dust that rises into the air and chokes me when I move either of my feet.

I step closer to my reflection, head swimming.

She looks back at me, pale and drawn. Her lips part, and I lean closer still, trying to make out what she's saying. It's a long, drawn out hiss that, try as I might, I cannot resolve into anything recognizable.

"Sarah," I finally hear, the sibilant S echoing in the otherwise silent room. Just my name, over and over.

The pattern of her voice changes.

"get out get out get out get out"

Now I can make out the click of her tongue against her teeth, watch her eyes skitter back and forth, and for the first time I wonder why I can see her  
 _-me-_  
in this place without light. We are oddly visible, she and I, impossibly, delicately illuminated. I raise my hand to my mouth.

She follows suit, and as I touch my lips with the pads of my fingers I realize that it is not she who is whispering, but me, chattering, terrified, pulse pounding visibly in my throat.

"he's coming" I hear myself say, thin and frightened, the skin over my face stretched too tight.

"he's coming he's coming he's coming" and I can't stop saying it, though I press my hand against my mouth to try to stifle it.

I lean in closer, closer, closer still, until I'm sure my forehead should have bumped up against the glass of the mirror, but then her  
 _-my-_  
eyes change, going from green to blue, one pupil dilating as the other contracts.

My hand drops from my mouth.

"Sarah." Her  
 _-my-_  
lips move, but the voice isn't mine anymore. Or, it is  
 _-is it?-_  
it's terrifyingly familiar, deep and resonant, it's the voice I don't allow myself to think about.

Now the reflection is growing, towering over me, and I know what to expect but my stomach shrinks even as it happens. Blond hair, not black. Features that are too sharp, chiseled crudely but confidently, too angular, too straight, too unforgiving.

My childhood dreams  
 _-memories-_  
had edited him into something friendlier, had put a twinkle into his eyes and a soft smile to tug at his lips, and there is none of that here, only a cold regal bearing that shimmers with barely-contained anger.

It's the first time I've seen him in ten years, and I can only wonder how I could ever have thought that he sparkled.

"Sarah," he says again, and my knees quake, vision blurs. "Yes," he says as I sink to my knees, my legs giving up the ghost, refusing to keep me upright. "Cower before me."

His voice rumbles like thunder until something snaps with an ear-splitting crack; light floods the room and suddenly there are millions of us, both of us, stretching off in every direction, he, imposing in intricate black armor above me, knelt pathetically on the ground beneath him, and then my mind goes blank.

* * *

I wake in the middle of the kitchen, clutching half of a shattered glass, kneeling in the remnants of glass and water that mixes with the blood from my hand and knees. The pain from deep, ragged cuts in both knees and my hand filters slowly into my consciousness, building to a red-hot scream. Jen is looking at me, horrified, and I cannot tear my eyes away from the red swirls across the floor, nearly black in the dearth of moonlight.

Cannot feel anything except hot shame to match the slick heat between my legs.

"Sarah," she says, "You have to talk to someone about this."

The clock on the stove reads 3:13, the moon is nascent, and I can hear  
 _-no, I can feel-_  
laughter ringing in my ears.

He's coming.


	2. Peach

I told Jen that I'd made an appointment to see a shrink, but I don't need a professional poking around in my head to tell me that something's not quite right.

I've combed through the books in the local college library for what seems like an eternity and never found mention of one single disorder that matches up with the otherness that spreads through me like a virus.

If I told her this, she'd shake her head and insist that a professional is more up-to-date than the dusty books in the library, but I know better. This is some kill-or-be-killed business. If I look straight at the parts that aren't me, I might see something that wipes out my foundations, sends my entire world crashing down.

After all the work I've done to carefully cordon off the bits that don't feel like me, the prospect is more exhausting than frightening.

 _I was frightening,_ says that voice inside of me, petulantly. It's things like these that make it hard to take my inner monologue seriously when I'm not trapped in fever dreams.

So instead of heading to the nearest head-doctor's office, I walked briskly to work, my right hand wrapped tightly in white gauze.

Esther, rousing from where she was daydreaming behind the counter, seemed more-or-less happy to see me and sent me immediately out back to the greenhouse.

Work isn't ever particularly busy. Flowers are for special occasions for most people, so unless we're having wedding consultations with a high-strung bride or it's prom season, things around the shop stay calm and quiet.

The high school girl who insists on calling herself an intern - it's just a summer job, honestly - had flipped on the radio, but kept the volume low enough that it all blurred together into a muffled pop music tapestry in the background. One of the orchids - my pet project - had begun to bud, which made me smile. I tipped a couple of ice cubes into the soil, then turned to the baskets of fern fronds and baby's breath. Bouquet fillers are the bread for our butter.

I looked up at the clock to find it was well past my usual lunch break and I'd been at it for four hours. When I lose time at work, it isn't discomfiting. The work is repetitive, so it's easy to go on autopilot, and the greenhouse is always warm and humid. It practically invites me to daydream, so I've always been prone to drifting off while I prune and fertilize.

The girl with the radio was looking at me expectantly.

"What?"

"I said," she repeated, pausing to blow and snap a bubble from bright blue gum, "There's a farmer's market down the street today. Wanna go? You haven't eaten yet."

I can't remember ever having said more than hello or goodbye to her before - I don't even know what her name is - but I found myself walking out of the shop with her a few minutes later.

* * *

If you asked me what I wanted more than anything else in the world, I'd probably tell you that my greatest dream is to be a wildly successful best-selling award-winning novelist of some long, drawn-out series.

I don't know if I want that anymore, but back when I was trying the whole starving artist thing, I let my mind fly free all the time and wrote everything that presented itself to me. I figured the brainstorming process had to turn up something worthwhile. Unfortunately, every publisher I ever pitched to recoiled from the villain. Amusingly enough, I didn't see him as entirely villainous when I was writing him, which is probably why they hated him so much. It's hard to empathize with someone so alien, I suppose.

I guess I wouldn't know.

For a while, I had work as a copy-editor. I thought that maybe, if I proved myself to have a sharp eye and an unforgiving red pen, I could wedge my foot into the door and force someone to take me and my manuscripts seriously. Instead, I found myself beneath fluorescent lights from 8 to 4 every day, endlessly correcting split infinitives, misplaced modifiers, and slashing through prose so flowery I could smell it from the sidewalk outside.

At least I know I'd never commit unironic comma splicing.

So I figured I'd go home and just write. You know. Be the change you wish to see in the world instead of the force of that change.

Well. No one ever did take my manuscripts seriously. Couldn't look past the villain with the tight pants and the big blond hair. I thought about repackaging him as something more benign, but the words tangled themselves up every time I tried.

* * *

The market was only a few blocks down, maybe a ten-minute walk from the shop. Tinny music jangled from the headphones that the girl had left hanging around her neck, presumably out of consideration for me, but we still didn't speak. Instead, she snapped and popped her gum as we walked. I was too ashamed to ask her name. I didn't want to admit that I hadn't been listening to her on any of the occasions that she'd tried to talk to me, that I didn't know her name even after more than a month of working in the same space.

We were arriving at the rows of white canopies when a shiver raised the flesh on my arms, my blood running cold even before my vision registered the edge of a feathered cloak sweeping out of view behind a stall halfway down the block, but the chill gave way just as quickly to the warmth of the sun stroking the goosebumps away from my arms, and the strange whirring in my ears filtered away to the girl talking intently.

To me.

"Here," she was saying, pressing something into my palm. "Boy, you're out of it. I thought that was just something you did around the plants, you know, zen meditation or something, but even out here you're totally zoning out."

I paused, still telling myself _it was never there_ , and _no one wears feathers in June_ , and _no one wears feathers at all, honestly, Williams_ before I roused myself enough to respond, and noticed that we had arrived and were standing at a stall piled high with "farm-fresh produce".

"What is it?" I asked, already knowing the answer. The unmistakable scent of stonefruit wafted from the object in my hand. I gave it an experimental squeeze, pressing my thumb into it just so, and it gave. Just barely on this side of overripe. The underside of my tongue tingled almost painfully in anticipation.

"He has the best peaches," she said, indicating the little old man bent forward into a permanent hunch. The man didn't smile, but his eyes met mine and just for a moment they were hard and flat like black buttons. "Don't try to tell me you're not hungry," she said, another beat later, "I saw you skip lunch."

The man finally smiled, and his eyes were warm and brown, had always been warm and brown. "Got a tree or two out in the orchard giving me the most beautiful fruit," he said. "It's been a good year for 'em."

* * *

Normally, peaches fill me with revulsion.

Karen once told me that when I was younger, I loved them. The bigger and softer, the better. "It was the strangest thing," she said, "you always felt them out for soft spots. 'They're better when they're bruised,' you said, and sucked the juice right out of them. I was always trying to get you to eat a little more delicately, and it used to turn my stomach, the awful slurping sounds you made.

"Then, one day, we were out at the pick-your-own orchard. It was a little rainy, and a little cold, and you picked one up off of the ground. It was the oddest thing, because you were more than old enough to know better, but you picked it up and even at a distance, your father and I could see that it was rotting, nearly fermented, and you grinned while you ate it, the juice so dark it was brown running down your face."

I never understood why Karen felt the need to rehash this except that maybe she just enjoyed needling me, but the greedy otherness in me leapt at the story. I couldn't remember it at all, though it presumably happened when I was sixteen or seventeen, Toby still a toddler waddling happily through the bowing trees, heavy with fruit.

So maybe I've been losing time for years.

"Later that night you were violently ill, and the final time you vomited, you screamed and screamed, until your dad and I came running. 'It's inside me,' you were screaming, 'look, they're wriggling!' Of course, there weren't actually any maggots, so your father put you to bed and you cried until you fell asleep. Since then, you've never touched another peach."

* * *

Nevertheless, the reality of the peach currently in my hand, the pleasant face of the little old man, the smell of it, the fuzz that my thumb sheared gently off of the skin was filling me with gnawing hunger. I couldn't remember how it would taste.

"Can," I began, but then swallowed, my mouth suddenly filled with saliva, "can I get a bag for this? I feel like I should eat something more substantial first."

"You want a bag for one peach," the girl said, raising her eyebrows and snapping her gum.

"I guess I could do without."

I held the peach loosely in my hand while she and I stopped at a deli to pick up a sandwich and walked back to the shop. I set it on the break room table next to my keys, and as I was packing up to go at the end of the day, Esther looked up.

"Busy day?"

"I guess," I said, smiling easily at her. Esther is the kind of person I'd always imagined in places like the flower shop, old bookshops, antique stores. She's hands-off as an employer and pretty relaxed, which is good because half the time I'm fifteen minutes early to make up for the other half of the time being fifteen minutes late.

She ran her fingers through her dark hair, beginning to gray in streaks that almost looked intentional, but Esther doesn't have the kind of edginess that one might associate with such a fashion statement. She's grandmotherly, if anything. "Happy birthday!" she said, brandishing a gorgeous bouquet of calla lilies, perfect little trumpets of deep purple and pure white.

I laughed, forgetting about the peach for a moment. "That's a really nice sentiment, Esther," I said dryly.

"One year closer to death!" she crowed.

Okay, so maybe she's not that grandmotherly after all. At least, not like any sweet little old grandma I've had the pleasure of meeting.

I took the flowers, wrapped carefully in crinkling plastic over diaphanous green tissue paper. "Thanks, Esther. I'll be sure to meditate on my impending demise tonight over these and some green bean casserole."

We were both laughing when I left the shop, keys in my pocket, flowers in one hand, peach in the other.

* * *

I considered reconstituting a can of condensed soup for dinner, but the peach was niggling in the back of my mind and I was ravenously hungry. So when I finally came back, tossed my keys in the bowl by the door and kicked off my shoes, I headed to the kitchen.

The flowers in my birthday bouquet were starting to wilt already, and I supposed the day had been warm and dry, although I was used to calla lilies being a little hardier than these. I set the peach on the counter and took a crystal-cut vase from the cupboard above the refrigerator. I filled it halfway with water, snipped the stems on the lilies, and eased them into the vase where they fanned out prettily, a half-sphere of purple and white, passion and purity.

I took the vase, the peach, and a paring knife to the living room, where I set the vase on the coffee table, sat on the couch, and held the peach for a moment, examining it. The scent was strong and heady; I couldn't decide whether or not it was abnormally so because I hadn't had a peach in the house for years, but it was so strong it clouded my senses, my stomach clenching voraciously.

It was huge, at least as large as my fist, round and red and yellow, its velvet skin warm. I plucked the stem from it, then slipped the knife into the resultant hole, following the seam of the fruit and running it around the pit. I nicked my thumb while I was cutting, and as I separated the halves of the peach, my blood mingled with its juice.

Popping my thumb into my mouth, I tasted the sharp tang of blood and the sweet nectar of the peach and felt a bit dizzy. As I traced my tongue along the short, deep incision in my finger, my stomach lurched, half-hunger, half-revulsion. The peach halves glistened darkly in the half-light of dusk, there where they sat beneath a canopy of calla lilies.

I reached for the half that had come away without the pit and took a bite. My teeth sank into its flesh without resistance, and juice ran down my chin. My fingers smeared it away, and when I looked at them I expected them to be stained dark, but they were uncolored, if sticky. The feeling of vertigo intensified, the room starting to slant sideways, the razor-thin curve of the moon growing impossibly large in the night sky.

As if I were outside of myself, I felt time fall away, watched the flowers blur into indistinct patches of purple and white, felt the strangeness inside of me abruptly come forward, shouldering me aside, and I-

* * *

It felt like falling, but I was not afraid.

* * *

 **Quick Author's Note:**

This chapter is a little bit slow and a little bit ponderous because I was still trying to lay groundwork and didn't want to post a chapter 2 that is twice as long as many of the chapters that follow. Small things like that bother me. So here is my solemn promise that this will be the only chapter that doesn't contain at least a little Jareth. Chapter 3 soon.


	3. Fog

The sky is painted grey with clouds.

At first, I'm not certain that I'm outside, but a stale breeze sweeps over my bare feet, carrying dead leaves that scrape the ground noisily. I shiver, rubbing my bare arms with my hands, crossing them tightly across my chest.

I'm wearing a threadbare slip, downy grey and soft as ( _feathers_ ) against my skin. It falls to just past my knees and the straps are at least a couple of fingers wide over my shoulders, so I am afforded some modesty in this place, but it doesn't offer any buffer against the cold, dusty air.

There's a fog settling in the distance, creeping toward me, and fatigue is sinking heavily into my joints, but I walk forward anyway. The wall in front of me is smooth and unbroken, a solid sheet of white marble, stretching in every dimension as far as I can see.

Which isn't particularly far, and shrinking quickly as the fog extends smoky fingers toward me.

Trailing my fingers along the wall, I start walking, because that's what I've always done when I find myself Underground. It feels familiar, but it's also not anything I've ever seen before. And a desperation is slowly building in me, a primitive instinct about the fog and the creatures it might be disguising.

As if on cue, I hear a faint scrabbling in the distance, what might be claws on stone, and I hold my breath to hear it better. But when the sound of my panting cuts out, I hear unintelligible whispering, and that might be worse.

Now I am afraid.

The ground is unforgiving beneath my feet, and I trip more than once on a loose cobblestone, my arms flying out to try to steady myself, one of them always touching the wall beside me. I don't know where to go, but I can't walk toward the fog, and walking out into the open seems more dangerous than being trapped against the wall. The very thought of being exposed out on the long, unbroken plane of grey stone under grey sky makes my heart skip a beat.

It isn't reasonable or rational, but I am operating under the conviction that every scuff of my feet against the ground is alerting creatures in the mist to my presence. I don't belong here. If I could get to the other side of the wall, I might be safe. It's separating me from something I need. I don't know how I know it, but if I can't cross the barrier, I'll never see whatever it is again.

I'm running now, racing along the ground, fingers skimming cold marble, feet pattering softly on the ground. My head is full of scratching and growling and muttering, but I don't make a sound, not a single sound, barely allow myself to gasp shallowly for air. I'm desperate to find some opening in the wall, some foothold, desperate to cross over to the other side and escape the encroaching fog.

Normally, in dreams, I can't move fast enough, like I'm wading through molasses and can't keep my balance. Here in this grey in-between, I am flying, moving at a breakneck pace that makes me fear for my own well-being, remembering the loose stones beneath my feet, and I look behind me because there is nothing ahead of me except ominous clouds, this one single wall, and the ground, littered with leaves.

With a nasty jolt, I discover that fog is nipping playfully at my heels _(a game of cat and mouse and I am the mouse_  
 _I am the mouse_  
 _I am-)_  
My heart rockets into my throat, my hands dampen, prickle with painful electricity. Behind me, the opaque mist lunges up and up, a tidal wave of whiteness, beginning to spill over itself in its hurry to catch me. I call on any energy left in reserve to fight the growing heaviness of my body-

and then, rather than the jutting stone I'd imagined would ultimately thwart my escape, I distinctly feel something moist and not entirely substantial wrapping around my ankle and yanking me back, and I fall, skidding across the ground as the mist swallows me up, muting my senses, my elbows bearing the brunt of the fall until my progress is abruptly stopped in a sprawl against the wall.

The muttering builds to a cacophony and I keep my eyes tightly shut, unwilling to confront the source of the breath puffing over my extremities, which all feel as though they've been draped with spiderwebs, sticky and unyielding. But when I finally open my eyes, there is nothing but the sound, no ghosts or ghouls ( _or goblins_ ) leaning over me and grinning horribly, and that makes it worse.

I brace myself against the ground and against the wall and stand, unable to see more than what I assume is two feet in any direction.

And then I hear it.

Footsteps. Not scratching, not whispering - the voices fade to nothing, not growling or roaring – but footsteps, steadily approaching.

And he emerges from the smoke, inches away from me. It curls around and then away from him, creating a space where the air is clear around us. This new void encapsulating us is perfectly spherical, mimicking the shape of the crystal he holds loosely in one hand.

He is pride incarnate, terrible and beautiful. His skin is nearly as white as the wall that I have pressed my back against, and his eyes burn strangely in his thin, gaunt face.

"So, Sarah," he says, his lips turning meanly upward, baring jagged teeth as he steps forward, bends slightly, puts his lips close to my ear, "How are you enjoying your labyrinth?" The rhythm of his speech is alien but familiar and his breath burns where it touches my skin.

I can't get enough air, even though my hair whips loosely around my shoulders.

 _the mouse, I am the mouse_

"Yes, Sarah," he continues, and his voice is resonant and although it is quiet it makes my bones ache as though he has discovered my frequency and could shatter me with a few choice words. "I've made it for you and with you. You and I have had much work to do since you tore my last labyrinth to pieces. Mending the fabric of space and time is not child's play, but I think you'll agree that you owed the debt to me."

I gasp, my lungs finally inflating, ballooning in my chest. "M-my labyrinth?" I ask dumbly, words tangling on my too-thick tongue. I'm reduced to the child I was ten years ago, unable to think clearly in his presence, afraid and too old to call upon the foolish defiance I once had in spades.

"I've been waiting for you," he says, ignoring my question to trail his gaze indelicately over my slip.

"Well, it's not much of a labyrinth, is it?" I manage to indicate, with trembling fingers, the grey horizon broken by this single wall.

"On the contrary. You've created an uncrackable riddle. You can't get in; you can't get out." His eyes glitter dangerously. "It's very clever. I couldn't have done it without you."

The fog presses like something alive against the unseen barrier. I realize that the nucleus of the sphere we stand in is the crystal in his palm, lit dimly from within.

"I haven't seen you in ten years," I say childishly. "I couldn't possibly have done this. It isn't real!"

"Come now, Sarah, now is hardly the time for petulance."

He is at least as much taller than I am as he ever was, a full head and shoulders above me. A black cloak flutters in tatters from his shoulders, curling around his torso. Grey leather leggings, heeled boots, a flowing white shirt beneath a black vest…

I can barely look at him. He makes my eyes ache.

"What do you want?" I ask. My voice shakes.

"You know very well what I want." The hand holding the crystal moves almost imperceptibly, and like a spooked horse, I bolt.

Or try to, anyway, until I find myself stopped, his gloved hand wrapped around my upper arm. It hurts, the sudden stop via the wrench of my shoulder. Panic rises like a tide in my chest, flight impulse stopped but fight impulse lolling helplessly at the look in his eyes, his fingers like steel bands around me, thwarted adrenaline fuzzing my mind, making me stupid and confused.

"Call me by my name," he says suddenly. The words sound like a thunderclap, and my mouth opens as if compelled to do so-

I am compelled-

Somehow it has not occurred to me that he should have a name, that he would be bound by such a low, common tradition, that the name for him would be something that could be torn from my mortal lips. But of course he has a name. Naming oneself is the very zenith of vanity.

And I do not know his name.

Low wailing emanates from beyond the wall.

"But I don't - I can't remember," I plead, the words a rough whisper of supplication, and his hand tightens, his head tilting, more canine than human.

"Really, Sarah," he says bitterly. "You can do better. How quickly you forget."

If I didn't know better, I would believe that a flicker of hurt passed through his features, if only for an instant. But he is not vulnerable, he is vengeful, and I-

 _I am the mouse_

"I can't!" My voice is rough with fear. "We never had a proper introduction. For all I remember, I never even knew your name."

He pauses, looks thoughtful, loosens his grip slightly. "I was certain my incompetent subjects must have had at least one loose tongue among them, but perhaps the old fool was wiser in this than in other tasks. Sarah, my love, my little plaything," he says, removing his hand from my arm to collapse mockingly into a bow before me. "The pleasure is all yours, I assure you."

As he speaks, I can feel it reaching for me, his name, struggling to break the surface of everything I'd worked so hard to forget, and I know that I've heard it before though I've never spoken it, but my mind is sluggish and uncooperative, and watching his body kneel, contorting with animal grace, makes me certain that I do not want to know it.

The break in eye contact, the role reversal from our last meeting ejects me from my stupor abruptly. Before I understand what I'm doing, I push off the wall to leave the space created by the crystal, sprinting haphazardly, drunkenly into the clouds surrounding us. Repressed memories begin to converge on me in a chaotic din of sound and light so that I cannot hear whether he is in pursuit, and I fight them off, rabidly clinging to ignorance.

If I remember his name, something awful will happen.

I remember words, but they aren't his name. Triumphantly, I call back over my shoulder to him, taunting, confident in victory. Words from a glorified nursery rhyme, from folklore in an old play, from a little battered book bound in red leather.

 _My kingdom as great._

"You have no power over me."

I scream it, and my throat crackles with the force of it, and darkness drops around me like a curtain. I drop to my knees, press my palms against the ground because it is tilting crazily below me, rendering me unable to reorient myself in the blackness.

"But, you see, Sarah," he says, disembodied voice in my inner ear just before the ground drops away from beneath my hands and knees and I enter free fall,

"I do."

* * *

I jolted awake to the sound of Jen slamming the apartment door, heart racing but otherwise intact, sitting safely on the couch.

"Why didn't you turn the lights on?" she asked, and I could hear the frustration of a long, rough day in her voice.

I plastered a smile on my face and felt the horror of the past few minutes start to fall away. "I was looking at the night sky." It was only partly falsehood: I distinctly remembered noticing how huge the moon had looked before I fell sideways into my personal nightmare fantasyland. Turning to look out the bay windows myself, the moon seemed a smile rather than a scythe, and certainly wasn't large enough to give anyone pause.

"Really." Jen crossed the apartment to the window, nearly pressed her nose up against it. "Seems unremarkable to me."

"We are made of starstuff," I said, grandly, invoking Sagan in a bid to convince her of my levity, but my voice sounded artificially hearty even to my own ears.

"Sarah, there are, like, eight stars we can see from here tonight. Have you seriously been staring out the window since you got back from work?"

I looked at the clock above the stove, and it read 10:25pm. I got home from work around 7. Time has telescoped, and I with it.

 _I have reordered time_

"Must've fallen asleep. Anytime can be naptime!" She turned and gave me a look as I said it, skeptical but also a little bit amused despite herself, and then she crossed the room and flipped the lights on.

"What the hell."

"What?" I whirled to see what had not been obvious in the apartment's dusky twilight palette.

Under the artificial lights, the bell-shaped sheaths of the once white and purple flowers from Esther were now coal-black. The entire centerpiece evoked inky silhouettes curling over the lip of the vase.

"You know, I thought when you took the florist job, you'd bring something nice home once in a while," she sighed, "but there's no accounting for taste. Your love for the macabre makes me itch. Do we have to keep those in the living room?"

"No," I said, "Esther is playing a practical joke on me. She gave me those flowers for my birthday, and calla lilies are really popular funeral flowers, so there's this association with death, and since it was my quarter-century celebration, she's riffing on old age and having one foot in the grave." I paused, hating myself for babbling on about it. "Anyway, I don't know how she did it, but I don't want them anymore."

"Elaborate joke," Jen said. "Artists are so morbid."

"Says the photographer."

"Light and color, Sarah. Celebration of life. Not spooky black birthday flowers of death."

I reached down to pick them up and toss the flowers in the bin, and as I did, my hand barely brushed the whorl of one of the flowers. It crumbled into ash, sprinkling into a tiny heap on the table, and as my hands shifted the vase, the rest followed suit, blanketing the table, the carpet, and the formerly pristine white bandage on my right hand in chalky soot.

"That is some party trick," Jen said, now sounding more impressed than anything. A chill ran down my spine as I spotted the remaining half of my peach perched amid the mess. It rocked gently in response to some unfelt groundswell, swollen and sanguine, spattered with inky black. _But it was yellow, before_.

"I'll get the vacuum," I said, shaken, but as I turned to retrieve it from the front closet, Jen shrieked.

"What the _hell_ , Sarah?"

"What now?" I asked, but she had already come up behind me, holding my arm tightly at the shoulder and the elbow.

"Who did this to you?"

When I looked down, I saw four dark purple bruises spidering their way around my upper arm, freakishly long and slender but unmistakably from the punishingly tight grip of fingers.

My eyes came back up to Jen's face, and I knew they were guilty and scared.

 _Oh, but you see, Sarah:_  
 _I do._


	4. Forest

"Sarah, for real," Jen said for the fifth time. "You have to talk to someone about this. Something is going on with you."

"I'm already seeing someone," I lied. After we'd noticed the bruises yesterday, I'd slipped on an old cardigan this morning to cover them up, even though the apartment was erring on the side of uncomfortably warm.

Jen clearly didn't believe me. "You're seeing a shrink? Or you're seeing someone who's doing this to you? I didn't even know you had a boyfriend."

My lips quirked upwards at her perfectly reasonable assumption. The term 'boyfriend' just seemed comical in light of the dreams I've been having.

"Seriously, Sarah. I'll make the appointment for you, if you want. I'll drive you. I'll even wait in the waiting room with eight-year-old magazines if you'll talk to someone. Please."

Irritation surged in my chest. "I'll take care of it, Jen."

"I'm just worried about you," she said quietly, interlacing her fingers. "If I hadn't seen you cut up your own hand and knees on the glass a couple nights ago, I'd be losing my mind. You don't seem well lately. Is it because you're worried about your family? Where did you get those bruises?"

"Listen," I said, pulling the sleeves of the sweater over my hands and balling the material in my fists. "Do you want to hear about a dream I had recently?"

"Sure." She sank down on the couch, putting her feet up on the newly vacuumed coffee table.

I told her everything I remembered about the dream, carefully omitting the bits that pertained to him. I figured she wouldn't believe me about having the dream at all if I happened to conveniently explain the spindly handprint on my arm. Dream bruises aren't even a convenient explanation. She'd probably accuse me of ripping off Nightmare on Elm Street, and if I was in her position, I'd think the same thing.

Instead, I told her about some guy I didn't know emerging mysteriously from the fog, loosely describing the kid that was always popping in to see our teenage protégé at the shop, and fudged most of the details.

Even so, when I finished what I thought was a lame and uninspired edit of a story, she was staring intently at me.

"That was a dream and not a movie?"

"What?" I asked, genuinely confused. "That would be a terrible movie."

"Well, yeah, it wasn't exactly chock-full of cinematic material but… when I dream, I barely remember any of it," she said, honest confusion wrinkling her forehead. "Like, falling is pretty common, I think, and running is, too, but it's usually less efficient than you were describing."

"I don't think it's that weird."

"But you remembered _everything_. And that dude you apparently don't even know was so detailed. I mean, you know what he was wearing! You know what you were wearing. Is that normal for you?"

"I don't… is what normal?"

"I mean are you usually so present and in control in your dreams? It sounds a lot like lucid dreaming."

"Is it not normal to dream like that?" I asked, legitimately surprised. "I've always been in control, if you call what I just described to you being in control."

"And your dreams follow a linear narrative?" she asked.

"I guess so? Why do you know so much about dreams? How do you know _I'm_ the weird one?"

"I took some introductory psychology and looked into dream analysis for a while," she said, almost sheepishly. "I mean it isn't exactly one of the hard sciences, but there's some pretty convincing research behind it. My college boyfriend was having these trippy dreams and they freaked him out, and we were covering Freud and Jung in Psych 101, so I looked into it for him. Tried and true procrastination technique.

"Anyway, most people only remember fragments of dreams, and only right when they wake up. And more often than not, they're sort of passive observers. I mean, that's obviously not always true. But most dreams certainly don't achieve the level of detail that yours apparently do."

At least she had momentarily forgotten about the shrink. I was more concerned with the discovery that I apparently haven't been dreaming like everyone else.

As for why that might be, I had an inkling.

 _look what I'm offering you:_  
 _your dreams_

* * *

I haven't made a big production out of my birthday in years, and neither has anyone else. My mother usually mails a card that my father has to forward to me, and he and Karen and Toby usually take me out for dinner, but the days of big parties and gifts wrapped in bright paper are in my past.

This year, we went to an upscale Italian place (it's always an Italian place).

My dad barely says two sentences to me at a time anymore. Karen thinks he's taken my professional trajectory very personally. I told her I don't think he gets to feel personally injured by my decisions about my own life, and she tutted at me. "He's your father, Sarah. Of course he cares."

For a while, I did indulge him, told him I was going to pick up a double major in microbiology and creative writing because the humanities classes were going to be a piece of cake, practically a single concentration in physical sciences with some liberal arts classes for fun on the side. Then I'd do medical school or law school or graduate school, one of those post-graduate degrees that requires a standardized test for admission.

That plan fell by the wayside when I didn't enjoy general biology, earned a D+ in general chemistry, and threw myself into the arts. I probably should have told him before I graduated and didn't have a backup plan in place. I can still remember how thin and white his lips got when he grabbed my diploma and noted the distinct lack of a B.S. in microbiology. Ha, ha: B.S.

He doesn't think much of the entertainment industry, my mother being a once semi-successful actress and all. To be fair to him, her career was what propelled their marriage into a divorce.

Toby doesn't talk to me, either, and I find this more distressing. I figure everyone has trouble with their parents. What kind of an eleven year old doesn't look up to his older sister? What does an older sibling have to do to so completely lose the adoration of her little brother?

I was just going to order the gnocchi at dinner, but Karen frowned when I told her what I was planning to order. "It's your birthday," she said, "We must spare no expense."

My dad looked up and smiled at me, nodded once, and I was emboldened. I ordered the veal. Toby ordered the spaghetti, and I wanted to tease him about being boring, but he stared sullenly at the table, arms crossed over his chest. Eleven year old kids get to order spaghetti if they want it, I guess.

Karen ordered an $80 bottle of Barbera for herself and me; the waiter had me taste it as the guest of honor, and it was good, but I don't discriminate when it comes to wine. I'm not a big drinker, but when I do partake, I'm not picky.

The food was hot and rich, and I was almost finished with my dinner and well into my second generous glass of wine when Dad nudged Toby. "Hey Tobe, tell Sarah what you learned at school this year."

I felt bad for him, because it was exactly the kind of question that I still hated having to answer, vague and open-ended. Toby pushed a few noodles around his plate, a thick slice of crumbling baguette soaking up the excess sauce, before he set the fork down and looked up at me. I'd forgotten how blue his eyes were.

"Did you know Frankenstein isn't the monster?" he asked sweetly, red sauce crusted at the corners of his mouth.

I did, of course - four years of intensive reading for my literature courses pretty much mandate a nauseating familiarity with Mary Shelley - but I wanted to hear what he was going to say next, so I shook my head.

"Frankenstein was the scientist who made the monster," he continued. "The monster was only as bad as he was because of him. If Frankenstein didn't bring him to life, he wouldn't have existed." He sounds like he's challenging me. "My teacher says Frankenstein is the real monster."

"Well, it's a good thing I didn't end up being a scientist, then," I joked, but an uneasiness spread through my stomach as I sliced myself another bite of the veal.

"Seems a little dark for fifth grade," Karen said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly, and Toby dropped his gaze back to his plate.

"We just watched the movie," he muttered, shrugging one shoulder as if totally disinterested. "Some kids thought it was really scary, so she told us how he wasn't really bad. But I wasn't scared."

When our plates were littered with the last few remnants of the meal, the silverware placed neatly across them, the waiter brought me out a tiny dish of chocolate mousse to celebrate my birthday. I offered Toby a bite, but he just shook his head and blew a couple of bubbles in his soda before Karen squeezed his arm in silent warning.

As we left the restaurant, Dad pressed a few twenties into my hand. "Just in case times get tough," he said. "Or for coffee money, if everything's good. Happy birthday." I smiled at him and gave him a quick hug.

Karen hugged me next, kissed me on the cheek. "Happy birthday, honey. Remember, you're always welcome to drop by for dinner if you find yourself with an appetite and some free time. It's been seven years and I still haven't figured out that I'm cooking for three instead of four. Besides, Toby would love to see you more often."

Toby scuffed his sneaker against the ground.

"Bye, Toby," I said, my heart aching a little.

He looked up, earnestly, surprising me. "Twenty-five's pretty old." I laughed, and he laughed, and gave me a quick squeeze around the middle.

"Yeah, I guess so," I said. "Let me know if you need my old lady muscles to beat up the monsters in your room." I knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words left my mouth, and his body stiffened in confirmation. "Oh, no, Toby, you know I'm just kidding."

"Happy birthday, Sarah," he said tightly, and I saw fear in his eyes when he looked back as we parted in the parking lot.

* * *

"I'm going out," Jen said, looping the strap of her camera bag over her head. "Don't get into any trouble while I'm away." The door clicked shut behind her, and I heard the click of her key turning the deadbolt.

"Locking me in, huh," I called at the door, grinning.

Coffee is my fuel every day, but on the weekends I can take my time, which just means I grind whole beans in an electric grinder instead of filling up the paper filter with stale Maxwell House. The percolator grumbles away on the counter, and the earthy smell makes me anxious to pour a cup, douse it liberally with half-and-half, and get to work.

I've tried to make a habit of writing on the weekends. Jen is usually out somewhere, especially if the weather is compliant, shooting film and cajoling current students at our alma mater to let her into the darkroom. She has a good eye for great pictures, even in this small town. And I find the emptiness of the apartment a more fruitful place for thinking.

I sat in the shabby old recliner that previous tenants had abandoned in the apartment, popped the creaky footrest, grabbed the fat notebook I use to brainstorm and a pen. I took a sip from the steaming mug of coffee, put it back down on the side table, brandished the pen menacingly.

"I'm going to write something to pay the bills," I said cheerfully to myself, all thoughts of bruises and cuts banished. "Today's the day I begin my climb to the top of the bestsellers!"

Unfortunately, my well of creative impulse had run dry. I doodled song lyrics in the margin, drew a tiny creature hanging off of one of the blue lines on the page. The sun passed behind a cloud. A chill settled over the room.

I reached over for more coffee, absently humming to myself.

The mug was stone cold, cream congealing on the surface of the liquid inside.

The sun wasn't behind a cloud. It had passed out of the window entirely, was beaming in the other side of the apartment. The scrape of a key in the door prickled the skin on my arms. The doorknob turned, but the deadbolt held.

Then the sound of receding footsteps. Not Jen. _Then who?_

I craned my neck around to see the clock: nearly 4:00. When I brewed the coffee, it had been just past 10. I looked down at my lap.

My fingers were smudged darkly in blue ink. The notebook page open in my lap was smeared with fingerprints, and down the center of the page I had written - for the handwriting was unmistakably mine:

 _if I should die_  
 _before I wake_  
 _I pray the lord_  
 _my_  
 _soul_  
 _to_  
 _take_

When Jen got home half an hour later, I'd already stashed the notebook in my room and scrubbed my hands in the sink with every variety of soap I could find, turning my fingers an angry shade of red beneath the scalding hot water. She still remarked on the blue ink crusted beneath my fingernails.

I told her it was part of my creative process.

* * *

The grass is cold beneath my feet, cold and wet, moisture clinging to my skin.

I've never seen the forest that spreads out before me, but judging by the way the trees grow together too densely in spots, suspiciously sparsely in others… maybe calling them labyrinthine would be putting too fine a point on it.

Low light from the fat crescent of the moon and a smattering of stars barely filters through the canopy of leaves, but it is somehow enough to shimmer dimly in every bead of dew clinging to each leaf or blade of grass. Everything is pale silver and deep green. I look behind me and see that the forest neither thins nor thickens discernibly in any direction. I take several steps forward.

The forest guides me neatly to a clearing, overgrown with gnarled roots and taller grass. I hear low growling in the distance, and shrink back into the shadow of the nearest tree. Its bark is rough and hoary, and I rest my hand on it while peering out into the edges of the glade, which is itself a good deal larger than I initially thought.

A huge figure emerges from the twilight of the forest, barely visible on the opposite edge of the glade. It is monstrous, broad and muscular, probably fifteen feet tall and six across. Its growl intensifies, deepens to a roar. Though it is clearly more animal than human, it clenches powerful fists, raises them into the air, and the timbre of its snarling shakes even the tree I am leaning against.

A second silhouette strolls calmly out in front of the first, almost invisible against the backdrop of trees. "That's quite enough." His authoritative voice carries easily to where I am crouched. "Though I'd be angry, too, you poor stupid beast. Between the two of us, it's clear who came out ahead." The moonlight catches on a thatch of blond hair.

The beast cries out, anger fading slowly into lament.

"You ought to show some gratitude," he says, "I'm the reason you're here at all. Not all of your friends were so lucky. Even life as a monster is better than no life at all, no?"

Now the huge creature lumbers down, puts its head in its hands.

He laughs; it is an unpleasant, mocking sound, but it quickens my pulse even so. I struggle to keep my breathing steady and silent. "No, you're absolutely right. She'll never love you, not like this. You've changed to something quite loathsome. More's the pity that it's not your fault… or mine. Run along, then."

The beast rises to its feet, lets loose one last pained cry, and as it leaves I can feel the ground quake at every step.

But the second figure ( _he_ ) cocks his head suddenly, listening intently.

My blood rushes in my ears, deafening me. He draws near.

There is nothing soft or friendly about him. His lithe form is draped in robes the color of the midnight sky, a white shirt peeking from beneath them, open to the waist. A pendant hangs against the pale exposed flesh of his chest, dangling around his neck. Hawklike eyes scan the clearing; I press myself more tightly to the trunk of the tree.

"Sarah," he says, "You can't hide from me."

Terror lances through me.

"Come out and play, my little songbird," he calls. My heart thrills to his nearness, but my palms are damp. Waging war internally with myself, I worry my lip between my teeth, refuse to move. I plant my feet with shaky resolve, wriggling my toes into the soft, damp moss beneath them.

"Don't defy me, Sarah." Now his voice is steel, belying the danger that waits if I leave this shadow and expose myself. He draws closer; my joints twinge. He is looking at me. Is he looking at me? Can he see me?

He is so close that I can see his strangely dilated eye, a tiny ring of blue iris around a huge black pupil. He must see me. He is so close that I could reach out and touch him.

His eyes finally meet mine. I am paralyzed with fear, my fingernails scrabbling against the tree until I feel one of them bend, give way, snap against it.

His lip lifts in a snarl. His teeth are sharp and crooked. Deep within me, an ache spreading, heat lapping down my thighs.

"Run."

I obey.

* * *

I'm on my hands and knees in the grass outside of the apartment in my pajamas. A huge white nightcrawler oozes over my hand, and I recoil. Raindrops splatter down all around me, plastering my hair to my face. I can't see the sky for the clouds. The streetlight illuminating the yard flashes and goes out, and I wait for my eyes to adjust.

I turn my face to the building where I live. The living room light is on in our second-floor apartment, and through the window I can clearly see one of the bookshelves against the wall, the lamp mounted on the ceiling. It's very sobering, how much of my own apartment I can see from where I'm standing practically in the street.

As I'm making a mental note to close the curtains more often, the light in the apartment goes out. But it is not the sudden dark that makes my heart leap into my throat.

Just before the light flickered out, I saw a figure in the apartment, and after the light had gone, all that remained was a pair of eyes, gleaming impossibly out into the night.

 _one to watch_  
 _and one to pray_  
 _and two to bear_  
 _my soul away_


	5. Fountain

My mind fragmented and scattered as my breath exploded out of me, wetly, in gasps and sobs. I picked myself up, looked back up at the window.

Nothing.

Dark, of course, but no pair of eerily bright eyes staring down at me from within.

I saw what I saw, though. Didn't I?

 _Run_.

Still sobbing, I sprinted to the door, my feet slipping in puddled water on the lawn. I was kicking up plumes of rainwater behind me, splattering my bare legs with mud, and when I finally reached the door to the complex-

Slightly ajar.

I stared at it for a second, two seconds, five seconds. I must have left it open myself, when I came down here. Sleepwalking. Jen warned me that I'd been sleepwalking. I just walked myself outside and didn't shut the door behind me. No big deal. This door doesn't even lock, anyway, so anything that wanted to get in could have entered without my help.

Presumably it did lock, once, but where the bolt used to be there is only a hole, empty and rattling. It has been defunct since we moved in.

I was soaked, chilled to the bone. I folded my arms tightly across my body as I crossed the lobby, past the rows of mailboxes, but when I came to the stairwell, I unhooked one of my hands to hold the railing. Leaving dark footprints on each step, I ascended to the second floor slowly, carefully, gripping the side as though my life depended on it. The rain drummed against the building.

I entered the dimly lit hallway that led to our apartment, suffused in dread, barely able to keep from squeezing my eyes shut and feeling my way down rather than peer through the shadows. At the end of the corridor, our door was thrown wide open, a gaping maw opening onto the impermeable blackness of our apartment.

Water dripped from the hem of my shirt down my legs as I took one step at a time, forgetting to breathe until my lungs rebelled, quietly drawing a shaky breath. As soon as I was close enough, I slapped at the light switch on the wall inside the door.

Nothing. The apartment was cheerily lit and entirely empty.

I sagged in relief and turned to close the door behind me, yanking it shut with a little more force than was necessary. It swung past me to reveal a bone white face, long dark hair, deep-set luminous eyes fixed on me, teeth curling up into terrifying imitation of a smile.

I screamed, and I kept on screaming until my throat chafed and my voice ripped and Jen came barreling out of her room, a baseball bat clenched in her hands.

"Sarah," she said, shaking in the silence after my scream, keeping her voice steady with what was obviously a great effort. "What the fuck is going on?"

I looked down at myself, and I was not splattered with mud. I wasn't even wet. I cast a skittish glance at the window, and the sky was speckled with stars. No rain – not even a visible cloud. Was I ever even outside?

"Someone turned out the lights," I said, hoarsely, and then I caught myself. "I, uh - I guess it must have been a night terror. I'm really sorry I scared you, Jen."

She shrugged, shifted the bat from hand to hand, expelled a shaky breath and offered me a lopsided smile. "Well, you can't say I wasn't ready to do battle. Luck favors the prepared, as they say."

I couldn't quite muster up a smile of my own, so I nodded and apologized again. "I really am sorry about this. I, uh, maybe I'll see someone about it. At least I could maybe get something to make me sleep better."

"I'm going back to bed," she said, yawning, and disappeared back into her bedroom.

I took a deep breath, held it, slowly let it out, and faced the door. No ghoul waiting with teeth bared, ready to rip my throat out. As I threw the deadbolt, I started laughing and couldn't stop until I had thrown myself into bed and buried myself beneath every blanket I own.

* * *

"God," said Jen, when I finally emerged from my room just before noon, "You look awful."

"Thanks," I replied dryly, "I don't know what my self-esteem would do without you." I gratefully took the mug that she offered me and sipped from it.

"You break a nail last night?"

"Huh?" I looked down at my hands, and, sure enough, the nail bed on my right ring finger was crusted with dried blood, the nail broken off. "Oh. Yeah, I guess so. Didn't notice it in all the excitement." I swallowed another mouthful of coffee hot enough to blister and strip the skin from the roof of my mouth. "Guess I'm not gonna taste anything for a few days, but ah, coffee, bringer of life."

Jen laughed and took a bite of a piece of toast. "So I got my contact on campus to agree to let me into the darkroom this afternoon so I can develop my film from yesterday. You wanna come with?"

It was unspoken that I didn't want to be alone. I loved her for it. "And see the master at work? Absolutely I do."

"Great. Take a shower, and wear something grungy. We gotta be undercover or they'll bust me for the crime of chasing my dreams. Which is really unfair when you consider that they're using my tax dollars to maintain the facilities, but I'm not in the mood to play the martyr today."

"Can I at least finish my coffee first?"

"I made you that coffee," she said, "And I expect you to savor it. So yes. But don't take forever." Jen, as always, was impatient to see her pictures. While I scalded my tongue in my hurry to finish the mug, she reached into the bag already slung over her shoulder and checked the settings on her camera.

She was absently winding the film when she looked up suddenly, grinning. "Guess what, Sarah?"

"What?"

"I've got a shot or two left on this roll!" she crowed, removed the lens cap with a flick of her wrist, then brought the camera up and snapped a picture of me.

"Okay, okay! I'm going, I'll go shower," I laughed, shielding my face with one of my hands as she wound again. "I'm sorry! Just stop!"

In the shower, I had a few minutes to inventory my tired, sore body. My knees were scabbed where I'd cut them in the broken glass in the kitchen, and the deep cut in the webbing between my right finger and thumb was red-ringed and raised, but healing. I washed the blood from my broken fingernail, the sensitive exposed skin stinging painfully in the hot soapy water.

And of course, the bruises on my arm, tender and dark, the color starting to bleed from purple to yellow-brown between the spindly stripes. It was no wonder Jen was concerned. I certainly looked like something awful was going on.

Maybe it was. I certainly had no rational explanation for what was happening to me.

I stepped out and wiped the condensate from the mirror with a corner of my towel. Either I always looked this peaky after a too-hot shower, or Jen was absolutely right, and I looked awful. The change was primarily in and around my eyes, shadowed and tired.

I unpeeled a bandaid and wrapped it around the broken nail to protect it from the elements, but decided to leave the cuts on my hand and knees open to the air. Keeping Jen's suggestion to dress like a college student in mind, I eventually settled on a pair of old, faded jeans with an oversized sweatshirt that I'd worn until it was threadbare. It wouldn't keep me warm if the breeze turned cool, but the weather was comfortable and we weren't going to be outside all that long.

I was braiding my hair over my right shoulder when she burst into my room. "Time to go! Ready?"

"I thought I'd put on some makeup, but I guess I can do that in the car," I said.

"Do you even own makeup?" she asked, feigning astonishment, but waited long enough for me to grab my little black makeup bag before rushing me out the door.

Her 'sketchy co-ed hookup' was a short, denim-clad redhead with an easy grin who walked us into the appropriate wing of the visual arts building. "No one's scheduled to use it today," she was saying to Jen, "So don't worry too much about being out quick. Sundays are usually slow here."

"Thanks, Kelly," Jen said, and then grabbed me around the shoulders. I tried not to wince. "Sarah's just gonna observe me today, she won't get into any trouble. But if anything happens, I'll make sure they won't trace it back to you."

Kelly shrugged, still smiling. "No worries," she said, "No one takes security seriously here. Just, you know, if you totally lose track of time, I think they do a half-assed walkthrough around ten or eleven, so you probably want to be out by then."

I let my sleeves flop down over my hands as I followed Jen into the darkroom, and immediately felt like it might have been a mistake to come with her, even though the thought of being alone in our apartment had been unbearable this morning. She toggled the lights on and then back off, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the low light, I was able to see that the room was drenched in crimson.

"Ooh," I said, exaggerating the shiver in my voice, "Creepy. I had black death flowers, but you work in a room of blood. I don't think you get to judge me anymore."

Jen was busying herself over by the sink, a comfortingly familiar silhouette setting up four shallow basins of developing solutions. Her head turned toward me. "What? Oh. The safe light." She spread her arms, indicating the room around us. "An artist is forever at the whims of her medium, and the black-and-white paper doesn't mind red light, so blood-room it is."

"That's old-fashioned of you, printing in black and white," I replied, finding myself a stool to perch on in a location that was hopefully out of Jen's way.

"Chiaroscuro!" she trilled, the word rolling off of her tongue in over-accentuated Italian syllables. "I must study the shadows to hone my art."

She produced a film canister from her pocket with flair and tipped the film out into a gloved hand. As she began the process of converting her film to negatives, I looked around the tiny room. I couldn't shake a feeling of disquiet, but after several days of disturbing dreams, I could at least forgive myself for being uneasy. Jen was clearly in the zone, but I wished I could go back outside and pretend to be a student lounging in the sunlight on the quad.

The soothing noise of sloshing water brought my attention back to the counter; Jen was using clothespins to clip finished prints to the line running across her counter. She'd already done what looked like most of her roll, which probably meant that I'd been out of commission for several hours. I moved closer to get a better look.

"Sleeping beauty awakens," she intoned without looking up from what she was doing. "Nah, I get it though. The environment here is practically meditative for me. Coerces the trance-like state."

I couldn't tell whether she was downplaying it for herself, or for me, or not at all. I'd lost time again, and not an insignificant amount.

Jen likes varied subjects, so each set of photographs was a little bit different. The first few were flowers, which I examined with a critical eye. "I like your subject matter here," I said in what I hoped sounded like a stuffy academic tone. I even adopted a terrible British accent. "But the essence of their beauty is lost without the vibrancy of their colors."

She punched me playfully in my good arm, and I moved on to the next group while she was developing the last of the pictures. These were pictures of a playground, mostly abandoned. Occasionally I saw a shot with a small child-shaped blur halfway out of the frame, but most were abstract angles of playground equipment: jungle gyms standing starkly black against the white sky, a dented slide ending in a wind-rippled puddle, empty swings hanging from corroded chains.

For the next several photographs, she had walked up a stone path to a little abandoned house. "Where do you find this stuff?" I asked her, peering at a photograph of a spiderweb, shining like diamonds, spun between the posts of a rusty wrought iron fence, the squat little house out of focus in the background.

"I just walk around," she said, poking at a picture submerged in one of her solutions. "I see what I see. Anything is art! Some things are better art than others!"

I stopped at the very last picture she'd hung, a pane of glass with a jagged break in the top right corner that had sent thin cracks shooting through the remaining glass like lightning. The sky was reflected in the windowpane, and so was a single dead tree, spiky limbs reaching heavenward, distorted by both the cracks and the wavy settling of the glass. I leaned closer, trying to make out something in the lower left of the picture, but the contortion left it indistinct. Squinting, I leaned closer, my mind trying to filter the bloody cast from the picture-

"Sarah, check it out," Jen said brightly, "It's you!"

The picture she was lifting from the last basin was the picture she'd snapped in the kitchen. I was hesitant to see what she'd captured. An irrational reluctance began a slow crescendo in me as Jen produced a set of clothespins from a little box on the counter and hung it from the line next to the shattered window, then walked off to expose the last picture. I slid my eyes sideways and heaved a small breath of relief. No boogeymen in this picture, just me.

I was insubstantial, slightly off-center, wrapped in my thin robe and holding my mug of coffee in both hands, the bloody broken fingernail starkly visible in black and white. My hair was disheveled, obviously tangled, messily framing the pleasant expression in my face. But, as I'd noticed earlier in the bathroom, it was unforgiving in its factual appraisal of my eyes: the contrast of the shadows beneath them against my otherwise pale skin was jarring.

"I guess you can call it 'Coffee Wraith,'" I quipped to Jen, who had returned with one more photograph and submerged it in the first basin.

Jen laughed. "It's not so bad. It's a little ethereal! I'm impressed with myself for something so off-the-cuff." A few moments went by, as I stared at the window picture again and tried to make out the blur. I was so accustomed to the room that I hardly noticed how dark it was anymore.

"Sarah!" she cried, suddenly, making me jump nearly out of my skin. "Look at this trippy picture!"

I stepped over to look at the picture, and even through the rippling water, even with the picture only beginning to develop, I could make out exactly what she was talking about. This one was tight on my face as I lifted my hand to shield against her photographer's onslaught, but the blur of my arm or the dark wispy blur of my hair around my face wasn't what made it interesting.

In this picture, my eyes were perfectly in focus: open wide, looking directly into the lens, and my left pupil was threatening to swallow the iris, strikingly larger than my right pupil, which was contracted nearly to a point. A hint of a smile, foreign in its sardonic amusement, played around the soft, fuzzy edges of my lips.

Not my eyes. Not my smile.

My heart began to drum against my ribs, here in the blood-red darkness.

"It's amazing! I'll call it 'Anisocoria,'" she was saying excitedly, but before I knew what I was doing, I had thrown the door open and flooded the room with fluorescent light from the room outside, blinding both of us.

"Sarah, _no!_ " She curled her body completely over the picture in an unsuccessful bid to shield it. "Close the door, Sarah, you're ruining it! Close the door!"

I was bent, my hands on my knees, chest heaving. "I think I'm having a panic attack, Jen-"

" _Close the door_ and we'll deal with it," she shrieked.

I managed to step back into the darkroom, easing the door shut behind me, watching the light go. "I'm sorry, Jen," I said, walking slowly back over to where she was straightening up.

"It's no good," she sniffed, looking at the paper which was now almost entirely black, completely obscuring the subject matter. "I think my developing solutions are going off, anyway. God, Sarah, I was just trying to help by bringing you along today. Where's that negative? I might be able to print it again." She rapidly shuffled through a line of negatives cased in plastic, peering at them and then discarding them, one by one.

"I can't find it, and it's almost time to go," she lamented, tossing an angry look my way. "That was a great picture, Sarah. I could have put that up in a gallery somewhere."

"Maybe I don't want people staring at my creepy lopsided face, Jen," I retorted. "Let's just go."

"I probably left it in the enlarger," she said, and hurried away. "Aha!" She pulled it from the frame, held it up to the weak red light and squinted at it. "Shit. Shit! I don't know what's wrong with it, but it's totally useless now. Look!"

I looked, and all I could see was a dark rectangle. "I'm sorry, Jen. I really am."

But I wasn't, not really, and Jen was so bitterly disappointed that we barely talked as she drove us home.

* * *

This part of the labyrinth feels equal parts familiar and unfamiliar, as if I'd seen it only once before and my subconscious was trying to recreate it from the snatches of memory it had gathered together. Which, in the interest of fairness, is likely to be what's happening.

It must be high noon, here, because the sun is overhead, beating down onto my shoulders. There's a little pool with grotesque little statues standing in it, set in the center of a little stone courtyard, red-gray bricks paving up to its edge. I sit down beside the water and examine my reflection, relieved to confirm that my eyes are symmetrical and the same green as always. My hair falls over my shoulder in its thick, loose plait, and the tip of it just touches the surface, disturbing the reflection.

I look up at the statues, and wrinkle my nose in distaste at their anatomical detail. It doesn't surprise me, that this should exist here, but it doesn't mean I think it's picturesque. Rising from the center of the little goblin figures is a female nymph, arms beginning the ascent of a leisurely stretch above her head, naked torso. It makes me blush, because parts of her bear striking resemblance to parts of me, but her eyes are too large, lips too full, exquisitely carved hair falling in loose curls past a too-tiny waist to her hips. An idealization of the female form, and not a particularly realistic one.

It makes me shift where I sit at the edge of the pool, look back down at the glossy surface of the water, take the damp end of my braid into my hand and comb through it with my fingers. My broken fingernail catches on it and I react to the sudden discomfort with a sharp intake of breath.

Someone materializes behind my reflection in the water; my head turns so fast I feel several vertebrae in my neck pop, but there is no one there. I look back in the water, and there he is, tranquil and quiet, eyes looking through me or past me but certainly not at me. His hair falls thinly past his shoulders. A high-pitched chattering fills my ears as he smiles at something. His face is beautiful when he smiles, not dulling his edges but making them less prominent.

A sharp tug at my hair - I whirl for the second time to find a fairy fluttering by my ear, hummingbird wings buffeting at the air and stirring the loose tendrils of hair around my face. She is the source of the chattering, and possibly the inspiration for the nymph in the fountain with her pouting face.

Her eyes, taking up at least half of her face, glow molten gold and shimmer like shifting sands. Her legs are absurdly long, especially for such a small creature. She doesn't engender any kind of endearment for herself in my breast. In fact, I'm quite sure that she's a hateful little thing, and the fact that she's got several of my long, dark hairs clutched in her tiny fist doesn't help her case.

"What?" I ask her, and she shakes her head, turns her face to the sky, laughs and laughs. Even if she spoke my language, I wouldn't be able to understand her.

It is too hot here. I dip my fingers into the water, daub it at my temples.

"Sarah, dearest," I hear his voice, and even the fairy ceases her jabbering to listen, "Be careful not to encourage the local fauna. It isn't wise."

She smiles winningly at me as if to prove him wrong, reaches out with one tiny hand, and I mimic the gesture to open my palm to her. She alights on it, folding her wings flat against her body, bare feet pattering along my arm until she reaches my elbow.

I look back into the pool and see him looking at me, strangely stretched - as if through a bubble. "You're watching me," I say. The fairy is running her hands across my skin. It tickles, faintly.

"Did you expect anything less?"

I open my mouth to respond, but it turns to a shriek as the fairy seizes my skin, fingernails pricking unpleasantly, and sinks a set of excruciatingly sharp teeth into the translucent skin on the inside of my elbow. I shake my arm, but she holds tight, her grin buried in my flesh.

"Nasty little bite on them," he says, laughing from the water, voice echoing strangely. "Vile, vulgar little bloodsuckers. She's tasted you, now. I did warn you."

I grab her tiny little body with two fingers and yank her away from my skin. Her fingernails leave minuscule scrapes that sting in the open air; her pointed little face is streaked with blood. She screeches like nails down a chalkboard and I wince, still pinching her waist as her wings beat furiously against my fingers.

"You've created a much more perilous labyrinth for yourself," he says. "I'm impressed, but all the same, you'd best be getting back now."

I can see a swarm of sprites closing in on me, their angry garbled yammering building to a volume that presses in on my ears painfully, but as the fairy drops from my fingers, diving earthward before snapping her wings open to catch herself, my vision begins to go black, curling inward from the edges.

* * *

I wake nearly propped upright in bed against the pillows.

 _And Sarah_ , his voice echoes in my ears, _do attempt to remember my name, won't you?_

I look down at the spreading warmth in my arm, and a rivulet of blood the color of the darkroom runs into a growing splotch on the sheets. It comes from a tiny bite, the outline of teeth clearly visible between twin scrapings of razor-thin fingernails.

I rise, feeling oddly disconnected, as if still trapped in the dream, and go to the bathroom to rinse it with antiseptic and wrap it with gauze. When I return to bed, my drowsiness evaporates completely, and I toss and turn until the sun peeks wine-red from the horizon.


	6. Rose

Waking with the sun is more Jen's territory than mine, but when I tottered into the kitchen, rubbing at my eyes, she had the grace not to mention either my early rising or my pallid appearance.

"Another day in paradise," she murmured, scraping butter across a slice of toast.

I pulled the flannel button-down more closely around my shoulders and dumped six generous scoops of Maxwell House into a paper filter, filled up the water reservoir and slapped the coffee maker on. "I love the taste of sawdust in the morning."

"Why don't you just buy something nicer?" she asked, looking over her glass of orange juice at me.

"Just buy something nicer," I snorted, as if it wasn't a perfectly reasonable suggestion, "and cheat myself out of the experience of being a starving artist? When I'm so close to achieving my dreams?"

Jen laughed and took a bite of her toast. "You gonna eat anything, or are you just powered by bad coffee?"

"Bad coffee for now, later, who knows? Maybe I'll splurge on some cheese puffs for lunch." My stomach growled in anticipation. "See? She knows what's up. It's a good plan," I said, pointing to my midsection.

Jen shakes her head. "But, seriously, have you been eating, Sarah? I can't remember the last time I saw you eat something solid. Maybe it would help with your newfound peakiness."

"And here I thought you were going to be nice and let it go," I said, watching the steady drip of the percolator. "Fine. I'll have yogurt while I'm waiting."

I found a container of yogurt that was blessedly within its expiration date in the refrigerator and pulled it out, peeling back the foil top. "Yum. Fruit on the bottom. Love the texture of partially digested strawberries. Good stuff, probiotics."

"Ugh, Sarah, honestly," protested Jen, brushing crumbs from the corner of her mouth.

I swallowed a spoonful, and discovered that I was ravenously hungry, but my stomach twisted and rebelled, so I set the spoon and the yogurt down on the counter.

Jen was ready to leave, bag by the door, dressed in pressed slacks and a buttoned-up blouse, but she paused on her way out and looked back at me. "Listen, I'm sorry about freaking out on you yesterday. I was just really excited about that picture, but I know you didn't mean to ruin it. And it wasn't your fault that something happened to the negative. Maybe you can make it up to me by modeling for me sometime while I try to recreate the magic."

"Maybe," I said brightly, smiling until the door clicked behind her, but I had no intention of standing still for her to take another picture that would further blur the lines between reality and fantasy.

The percolator sputtered to a finish, so I grabbed a mug and filled it up, added a generous amount of cream, and sat on the couch with it until I felt alive again. It tasted like I had blended a pair of chopsticks very finely into a glass of hot water, but my stomach tolerated it, and I had another, then another, until all of my nerve endings were buzzing and my fingers shook slightly.

I snapped to attention at the smell of something burning. The residual coffee was black silt in the pot, smoking just a little bit, and I took it to rinse it out in the sink until I noticed the time and cursed inwardly. I should have been at work an hour ago.

I ripped a brush through my hair, threw on a pair of jeans and a pair of flats, grabbed my keys and flew from the apartment to my car, driving as fast as I dared to work. When I finally pushed open the door to the shop, Esther gave me a reproachful look.

"You know we have a meeting on Thursday for the Johnson wedding," she said. "I want to go over their guidelines today. You'll have to stay late to make up for this morning."

"I know, Esther, and I'm so sorry," I said between heaving breaths. "I overslept. It's my fault."

Her face softened. "You don't look like you're feeling very well. You probably needed the extra sleep. Ah, get back there and tend to your flowers, and we'll talk later this afternoon."

I tossed my keys on the breakroom table and entered the muggy greenhouse.

"Omigod!" the intern said, "Are you sick? I really don't want to be sick right now."

"I'm definitely not operating at a hundred percent," I muttered, still jittery from too much coffee on an empty stomach.

"What?" she asked, approaching as close as she apparently dared.

Unthinking, I rolled up the sleeves of my flannel shirt to above the elbows. I saw her eyes light on the gauzy bandage wrapped tightly around my elbow.

"What's wrong with you? Is it contagious?"

"No, no. I just had blood drawn the other day because I'm having trouble sleeping, you know, tired all the time," I lied smoothly. The bite under the gauze throbbed once, sharply, as if to punish me for my deceit. "But they assured me that whatever's going on, it's not contagious."

"Okay," she said, unconvinced, and retreated to the other end of the greenhouse. I couldn't see where she'd settled through the sea of green, but the full, velvety purple blooms of my orchid soon diverted my attention.

The next time I blinked, it was four in the afternoon, the light streaming through at a drastically different angle than it had been before my eyelids lifted. The intern sauntered past, leaving me a wide berth. "You are in the zone," she said, and I found that I had a bag full of leafy green ends in one hand and a pair of pruning shears in the other. As far as I could see down the row that I was currently occupying, the plants were neatly cut down, happy and healthy and green.

So at least I didn't do anything stupid when I lost time. There are worse things than entering a productive, reliable autopilot.

I slowly became aware that I was drenched in sweat, but as my battered hands and white-wrapped elbow were already visible, I chose to simply unbutton my shirt, letting it hang loosely open over my tank top. The chances of someone noticing the bruising on my arm were too high, and I didn't want to have a conversation about it.

"Esther's looking for you, by the way," said the girl, walking past again. "And you shouldn't skip meals if you're getting sick."

I dragged the back of my hand through the sweat collecting on my brow, and wandered off to meet Esther in the breakroom.

"The client wants all the centerpieces, bouquets and boutonnieres to be built around pink and white peonies," she said, flipping a binder open and running her finger down the page. "It should all be pretty routine, so I don't think we'll need to talk it over for very long. I wanted to discuss filler, and maybe pick your brain about the arrangements. The bride wants her bouquet to be red and white, actually, and the groom should have a white boutonniere while the groomsmen are pink and the bridesmaids are pink and white - this isn't organized very well..."

Esther looked over at me after talking for a few more minutes. "Are you getting this, Sarah?"

"Peonies, pink and white, red accents, what to use as filler," I rattled off, a little bit irritated with myself for failing to stay focused.

"Well, I suppose those are the pertinent details. It's a small wedding, so we should be able to handle it. And you look so worn out. Go home and eat something, get some sleep," she said kindly, "We'll be able to handle them when they come in later this week. Just don't be late for the meeting."

* * *

On my way home, I stopped at the deli and picked up a chicken salad sandwich, choking it down as I walked through the door of the apartment. It took effort to swallow, but I thought if I could just stomach it, it might help me feel less tired. And you're supposed to sleep better when you're not on an empty stomach. Anything to try and stave off the dreams that I was starting to think might not actually be dreams.

Jen was already home when I got back, lounging on the couch in pajama pants, nose buried in a novel. She glanced up at me as I entered. "Good to see you eating."

"Even coffee wraiths get hungry sometimes," I said around a mouthful of sandwich, and a little smile lit up her face. Photographs were strewn across the coffee table, and I was intrigued to get a look at them in natural light. I poked through them until I found the picture of the broken window.

"I really like that one," said Jen, who had set her book aside. "Not as good as the one you sabotaged, of course, but I'm proud of it."

"Do you know what this is, down here?" I asked her, pointing at the indistinct shape in the bottom of the frame. "I was trying to make it out yesterday, and I couldn't."

"Lends a general air of mystery to the shot," she said grandly, but then took the photo from me and brought it close to her face. "Yeah, I dunno. Looks a little like wings, or at least feathers, right? I think I remember an owl or something. It scared the shit out of me when it took off behind me, but I guess it was getting dark out so it wasn't that weird, that an owl would be up and around. Plus, mysterious picture? Art!"

I returned her smile, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why the possibility of an owl in that picture made me feel anxious. Something to do with white feathers and birds of night - so probably everything to do with him.

* * *

My eyes open on the maze. Stone walls stretch out before me, twisting and turning and blanketed thickly in climbing roses. I am unsurprised to see dusky blue and charcoal black blooms among the familiar yellow and white; their fragrance is nearly overpowering, floral and earthy.

"Oh good," rasps a voice to my left. "You're back. I could use a hand. Can't reach high enough, and my back is killing me."

He is a wizened little thing with a sallow complexion and a large protuberance of a nose, but his small, wide-set eyes are sharp and shrewd. He thrusts a pair of silver shears into my hand with a grunt, and as I examine them, they glitter dangerously in the weird twilight.

"I've never seen this part of the labyrinth before."

"'Course you have. You were here earlier today. Got all that done," he says, indicating before me with a sweep of his stubby arm. "Now you have to work in the other direction. And remember, it isn't haste makes waste, it's ignorance."

I almost want to laugh, but I'm more frustrated than amused by his presumptuousness. I draw myself up, towering over him. "Are you telling me that you're going to put me to work in my own labyrinth, and that I'd better work fast?"

"Ah," he says, blinking. "So you _have_ spoken with him. Thought that might be the case, on account of you not seeming particularly surprised to turn back up here."

I shake the shears at him, but he doesn't flinch even though we both know they could slice effortlessly through one of his fingers. "What if I don't feel like pruning anymore?"

"Let me put it this way," says the diminutive little man. "He may have told you that this is your labyrinth. You may believe him, may have built it with him, may even have placed some of the stones to anchor it here in its allotted place and time. But this will never be your labyrinth, not so long as he is here, and to displease him would be very dangerous indeed. So I would suggest that you waste no more time and get to clipping these roses back."

He may be tiny, but something in his eyes convinces me that he is not speaking out of malice. It unsettles me enough that I turn and look behind me.

It is a tangled mess of thorned vines that entirely barricade the path before me. I fall upon it, clipping barren vines close to the wall, opening up the way forward as they fall to the ground to be trampled underfoot. It is surprisingly quick work, at least as much due to the fantasy as it is to my familiarity with the chore, and soon I come upon a section that is far less overgrown, pale green tendrils reaching curiously out to the center of the pathway in a manner entirely divorced from what I understand about plant behavior.

One of them is budding, just beginning to unfurl, revealing silky royal blue petals within.

"I don't think I should cut this one back," I say, uncertain. The shears flash in the gloom.

"Oh, you should. Cut them all back. You're not here to make artistic decisions," he says.

I bristle. "You know, I do this for a living. It's called deadheading, and that bud is not dead. It's going to bloom in the next day or two. And if I'm not here to make artistic decisions, why did you pick me?"

" _I_ didn't pick you. For all you know, you picked you. And just because it isn't dead now doesn't mean it won't spread death later. That flower is destined to die whether or not you cut it back. You mustn't sacrifice the overall for one promising bloom."

I look up to where this tendril sprouted from the wall, and see no green buds there in the lattice. The plant is toiling only to fuel this one flower, and he is right. In order for the plant to continue to grow, the rose must be extinguished. The sight of the tiny blue-tipped bud fills me with unutterable sadness, but I lift the shears and snip it off where the stem branches out. It drops silently and I move onward, pruning dispassionately, trying not to feel as if each verdant stem is reaching out to me, begging for its life.

Not far beyond, as I proceed with my task, I come across a small alcove in the maze. Here grows a single rosebush, and in the rosebush nests a single white rose, half-open, and each of its petals glows brightly in the semidarkness as if lit from within, its edges glimmering as if diamond-encrusted. I reach out toward it, half-entranced, half-amused at the thought of reenacting a scene from Beauty and the Beast.

But he is a beast that will not be tamed, for no gentler man is trapped within him, and I am unconvinced that I could play the plucky heroine, and this is a rose that holds no sway over him.

"You're not entirely incorrect," he says behind me. It startles me so badly that the shears fall from my hand to land point-down in the soil at my feet. "It is a nice train of thought."

Instead of looking back at him, my eyes are fixed on the rose, hypnotized, and I reach further and further, wanting to touch the bloom.

"Ah," he says, and his breath ghosts along my neck, trailing goosebumps in its wake. "Shouldn't touch."

My fingertip brushes the swell of the outermost petals, and the rose falls fully and perfectly open before me. I smile at it. Its thorned stems coil around my forearm, sinking deeply into my flesh. I turn to him, and he is resplendent in a black silk shirt open at his throat, grey leather leggings, evaluating eyes.

"Make it let me go!" I cry, wincing as the vines pull taut, slicing raggedly through my skin, striping my arm with trickles of dark blood.

"Look," he says, eyes fixed past me, on the bloom. I watch as color bleeds into the petals of the rose, turning it from milk-white to garnet-red.

"Please," I whimper, "please make it stop."

"My damsel in distress," he smirks. "I am at your service." And then, like a panther, crouches fluidly into a bow before me. The thorns bite more deeply and my blood speckles the ground at my feet. When he rises, his attention is fixed on the vines crisscrossing my skin. "Except for this insubstantial little transgression, you've done lovely work in the maze of roses. And as much as I long to see you prettily restrained, this isn't exactly what I'd had in mind. Not for our first go."

He looks into my face, grinning wolfishly. One hand closes around my wrist as gloved fingers trace the whitening skin around the thorns, smearing blood across otherwise unmarked skin.

"It hurts," I shudder, pain intermingling with unsanctioned pleasure at his touch, my breath coming in short bursts.

"You still refuse to say my name," he says, shaking his head, but there is real frustration simmering beneath his façade of disappointment.

"I'm sorry," I moan, "Please let me go."

Finally his fingers delicately pry the end of the vine from my arm, and the rest of it detaches smoothly, obediently. I clutch my arm to my chest, disregarding the garish and immediate stain of the blood on the simple white shift that I'm wearing.

It won't follow me back, anyway.

He is standing before me, and the rose behind him, glowing red and twinkling in the half-light.

"Sarah, before you go, let me caution you," he says. His voice is low and amused. "You should be more careful about leaving snippets of yourself behind. Lose enough of yourself here, and you will soon find that you've lost all of yourself."

* * *

With his warning turning over ceaselessly in my mind, I slip out of bed. My blood streaks across the sheets, seeping from the many thin, jagged lacerations in my arm. In the bathroom, I run the water slightly warm and wet a washcloth, formerly white but now pinkish-grey, a casualty of too many reckless laundry sortings.

As I gently run it across my arm, I wonder what is happening to me. My eyes in my reflection are exhausted and scared, but I am numb except for the stinging of the cuts. As I set the washcloth aside and dab myself dry with a towel, I watch my mirror-twin.

Her lips move. I lean in.

"it's almost too late," she hisses.

I scowl at her. "Say something useful," I hiss back, watching her lips move with mine. It is no use. She remains silent and sullen, just as I am.

My return to my bedroom is punctuated by my door swinging gently shut, and then the quiet scrape of a dresser drawer. I pick up an old t-shirt, obtained as a free souvenir from an event back in college, and wrap it tightly around my forearm to stem the already slowing flow, then turn around.

My breath catches in my throat. The moonlight illuminates my desk, and there in a tiny crystal-cut vase sits a miniature rose, unfurling gently toward me in flawless bloom. Its petals are deepest blue.


	7. Swan

I woke well after sunrise the next morning and peeled the t-shirt from where it had adhered to my skin. The process reopened a small number of the cuts that peppered my skin. I felt slow and stupid, hardly able to think through the haze of exhaustion that settled over my senses.

The vase remained on my desk, defiantly asserting that it was not a figment of my imagination, but the touch of the sun had apparently proven fatal to the blossom within. Its petals lay in disarray on the desk where they had fallen, still inky blue. I'm not aware of any naturally-occurring blue roses, and I don't think he's much into food coloring experiments, so the rose is just one more tired fantasy cliché.

Blue rose: the holder will have her wishes granted.

It all seemed a little twee to me in the daylight, even given the indisputable physical presence of the rose I'd mourned in the maze last night. Given my current situation, I had to allow for a little leeway regarding the existence of the supernatural.

Jen was gone by the time I made my way into the kitchen, but she'd brewed me a full pot of coffee before she'd left. I poured myself a mug and glanced at the counter where she'd stuck a pale yellow post-it.

"Given any more thought to seeing someone? Saw your washcloth this morning. We should talk tonight. Enjoy your sawdust. -J"

I sighed and drank my coffee black.

Making it to work on time was high on my list of priorities for the day. I sailed into the shop, mostly put together, fifteen minutes early.

The workday passed uneventfully. I even hummed along to a song or two that I recognized from the intern's radio as time crawled along with me safely tucked inside it. I'd slipped on the thinnest full-sleeved shirt I could find in my closet, even though the delicate material was better suited to a business-casual venture than a day working wrist-deep in soil, but even though the shirt was light, I found myself sweating prodigiously.

The girl tossed me a candy bar when she came back from lunch. "I got this for you," she said, as if daring me to protest. "Figured if you're not gonna take your break, you should eat something convenient."

I thanked her, eased open the crinkly wrapper, and popped the bar into my mouth. My stomach gurgled hungrily in response. I swallowed to mollify her because the melted chocolate slowly turned to ash on my tongue.

* * *

Jen pounced on me as soon as I got home. I resented the anxiety plainly written across her face, but gamely sat down next to her on the couch. If I couldn't run and I couldn't hide, I would have to weather the storm.

"What's going on, Sarah?"

"Hello to you too," I grumbled. I'd been dreading this conversation since her post-it note this morning, and she wasn't going to make it easy for me to retreat or change the subject.

"Come on, Sarah. Talk to me. What was the blood in the bathroom all about? What's happening with you?"

"I don't know, nothing. I'm having trouble sleeping, that's all, and it's making me more accident-prone when I'm awake."

"And the handprint on your arm, that's your natural clumsiness too, right?" Her eyes narrowed and her frown deepened. "Just talk to me. I'm not trying to make you angry. I just want to help."

"I don't need help," I managed to say through gritted teeth, but I couldn't look at her face. I couldn't think about what this looked like from her perspective. I didn't want to consider the potential ramifications of the things that have been happening to me.

Have I been hallucinating? Have I done these things to myself?

Jen moved too quickly for me to stop her, closing her hand around my wrist without pausing at my small cry of pain, and with her other hand she deftly pushed my sleeve up past my elbow. Her face went slack with horror at the array of fresh scars across my skin.

"Did you do this to yourself?"

I wrenched my arm away, glaring at her. " _No_ , Jennifer, I am not cutting myself. I got tangled up in a rosebush. You know. At _work_. Where I work with _roses_."

She paused, considering. I knew it was a more-or-less reasonable explanation, especially given that as far as I know, I am being at least halfway truthful: the wounds are from a rosebush. I pushed it a bit further, rotating my arm to show her. "Do people who self-harm usually cut all the way around their arms?"

"I just have a hard time believing that you got tangled in a rosebush that extensively," she said, slowly. "I mean it looks like-"

"Sometimes the plants seem like they have a mind of their own," I suggested flippantly, yanking the sleeve back down. "They come alive! They don't like being cut down to size! They're just - like - us."

She didn't look any more convinced or any less concerned. "You might be a little mad at me for this, but I called around to find out who you might be able to get in to see on short notice, and I made you an appointment. It's for tomorrow."

"I'm not going. There's nothing wrong with me except a lack of sleep, and I am not going to see a shrink. What I need is some sleeping pills. I'm desperate enough to try horse tranquilizers."

"Well, you're in luck, because she's a psychiatrist and that means she has a prescription pad. You go in, talk it out, tell her you can't sleep and she'll probably hook you up."

"I have work tomorrow," I said mulishly. "I am not going to see a professional head-doctor so that they can pick apart all of my family issues when the only issue I am having is that my sleep is full of vivid dreams."

"Right, so," Jen said, "I'm going to pick you up from work at 2, and you'll be ready to go, and we'll see the doctor, and you'll get some help and then you'll get some sleep, and I'll get some peace of mind so that I can focus on my failed professional career instead of worrying about your general well-being. I don't want to have to find someone else to split the rent with me."

"I have to call Karen," I said, "And it's wedding season at work, so I think you should probably just cancel with Dr. Psychiatrist and let me mind my own business."

"Well, go call Karen, then," Jen replied, "But I'll see you tomorrow afternoon. I already took the time off."

I stalked into the kitchen and yanked the phone from its cradle, jabbing in the phone number that used to be mine.

Two rings later, Karen picked up. "Hello?"

"Hi, Karen, it's Sarah."

"Sarah! How are you? Is twenty-five treating you well so far?"

"Ah, I don't know. I haven't been feeling great this week. Karen, do you know if Toby has ever had trouble sleeping?"

"Well, I don't know, he's still just a kid. He usually sleeps pretty well, I think. Why?"

"I was just wondering if there was anyone he sees routinely, you know, for his mental health?" My voice inflected uncertainly at the end of the question, and Karen paused, letting silence fall over her end of the phone.

"Why on earth would you ask something like that? Am I unaware that mental instability runs in the family or something?"

"No, no. I mean, I don't know, but I don't think so. I was just curious if you had a sort of family practitioner that you saw regularly for anything like this, because I was thinking of seeing someone and I wanted to know if you could recommend anyone. I thought maybe if I could get a prescription to help me sleep, I'd have less trouble with nightmares."

"Toby had nightmares for a long time," she said slowly, "I guess you wouldn't have been aware of it because they started in force around the time that you moved out for college. We took him to a couple of doctors when he refused to sleep, but they never thought anything serious was wrong with him. Just a vivid imagination, which they insisted was normal and even healthy for a child his age. He hasn't said anything about nightmares recently. He's a very particular child, Sarah, but I don't think anything is wrong with him."

"Okay," I said, "Thanks anyway. I'll just play it by ear."

In the background of the call, I heard a door open, and then Toby's voice asked Karen who was on the phone.

"Just a second, dear," she said, and then, "Sarah? Do you want to talk to Toby for a minute? He says he wants to tell you something."

"Sure."

"Sarah?"

"Yeah, Tobe?"

"You have to be careful." My blood ran cold. His little voice was steady and sincere. "Bad things might be happening."

"What? What's happening, Toby? What are you talking about?"

"Sometimes it's not safe to fall asleep," he said, and then the line went dead, dial tone blaring in my ear.

Jen came up behind me. "Was that Toby? What's up with the little slugger?"

I didn't answer, only replaced the phone in the cradle without turning around.

* * *

The cloudless sky stretches out forever above me; there is a pronounced curve to it just where it bends to meet the horizon. I am struck simultaneously by agoraphobia and claustrophobia, as if I am about to escape gravity and soar off into the great beyond, but also as if the sky is a cap that closes in on me and traps me here.

It is night. The moon is half-full, but oddly reserved, as if the light it usually reflects cannot quite reach it, or cannot quite reach me. Stars swirl through the heavens, diamond-bright specks set in blue and purple and orange streaks. I have never seen galaxies this way, with my own two eyes, spreading across the visible atmosphere as far as I can see. It steals my breath away.

I am wearing a dress the color of eggshells with a squared off neckline, long flared sleeves, and a dropped waist embroidered in silver. I had a costume dress like this, once, but the one I am wearing now is no discarded hand-me-down for playing dress-up. The stark, spotless linen narrows with my body, then falls in gathers from my hips. The neckline drops until it stops just short of the swell of my breasts. My hair is gathered at the nape of my neck in soft curls.

A stream burbles behind me. Beyond a small stone bench, a swan glides noiselessly along the water. A stone bridge arcs three times as it crosses the stream.

And he reclines insouciantly, all in white, along its flat, wide railing. Watching me.

"I know this place," I say to him. "It's real."

"Is it?"

"It's the park by the house where I grew up."

"Is it?"

"Are you just going to turn everything I say back on me?" I ask. He uncrosses his ankles and steps neatly off of the bridge.

"Did you like my gift, Sarah?"

"The rose?"

"My gardener mentioned that you were distraught at its untimely demise. I thought you should experience it in its prime. But as you saw, its beauty was fleeting."

"You owed it to me after what you did to my flowers the other night," I snapped.

At my outburst, the sinister amusement in his face grows. He crosses the remaining ten feet between us swiftly. "Did I, Sarah?"

My mouth goes dry.

For the millionth time, I consider that he should not be beautiful, that the sum of his parts should be less than rather than greater than, but the way he looks at me makes my legs tremble.

"Why are we here?" I ask him, "Why not Underground?"

"Are you sure we aren't Underground?" he counters.

"I told you, I know this place. I used to play here."

The swan rears up out of the water, extends white wings and beats the air with them.

"Just because you played here as a child hardly means that we aren't Underground now. You helped me stitch the labyrinth back together. Is it so unthinkable that you might have sewn parts of yourself into it? Unwise, certainly, but not unlikely."

The sky is too wide. I am drained, so tired, eyelids like anvils. The dress I wear weighs too much, heavy on my shoulders, drags me down to earth. There is no danger of floating away into the abyss now.

"I don't understand," I say.

"That's because you aren't trying," he says, his voice tight with annoyance. "It's very disappointing, Sarah. I thought you capable of more."

"I don't understand why I'm here," I persist. "I don't understand why it's real, and I'm real, and you're not real. It's all mixed-up. It's all wrong."

He chuckles and the sound presses frozen fingers deep into my heart.

"What is real, Sarah? Are you sure yours is the authority to decide?"

I open my mouth to respond, but he continues. "Look at the sky. Have you ever seen such a sky before? Consider it a token of my affection."

I tilt my chin up, and the stars roil restlessly above me. As I watch, some of them begin to wink out, as if some celestial being is mending tiny holes in a midnight blue tapestry, one by one. At first, I'm sure it's a trick of the light, or of my eyes, but the seconds tick by metered only by the beating of my heart and I see a great dark swath curl across the sky, wiping out clusters of stars, leaving nothing in its wake.

The world spins around me. My legs give out. I fall backward, my vision full of sky, sleeves streaming in front of me, time slowing as I anticipate - dread - the collision of my head against the ground.

He is here, curving his body beneath me, catching my head in the basin of his hands. I float weirdly for a moment, then settle firmly against the ground, my neck elongated, supported by his slender thigh. He leans back on one hand as the white-gloved fingers of the other comb gently through the curls in my hair. Above me, his jawline, illuminated - but not softened - by moonlight. Here we settle against each other, silver and ebony.

"This is my home," I say uncertainly. His finger brushes along the shell of my ear. My heart turns over in my chest. "Why would I put my home into the labyrinth?"

"Sarah," he says, and his voice travels through him into me, thrumming through my skull. "You are a lucky girl, to have seen so much. Most are not so fortunate."

"I haven't seen any more of anything than anyone else."

"Always ungenerous." His voice rumbles. "I have shown you beginnings and endings, the extinguishing of millions of worlds ancient beyond comprehension, and you can only think of your own personal failings. Life is so much greater than you even begin to grasp."

I push this away, down and out of my mind because it will not withstand the concept of seeing billions of years unfold in the night sky simply because he told them to. "I just don't understand why we're here. I don't understand why _you're_ here."

"Why, Sarah," he says, smiling, and his jagged teeth are sharp and white, "I'm here because you invited me."

I sit up in one accelerated movement to confront him, demand answers, but the blood drains from my brain, my lungs pull at the air-

* * *

The sky is gone, and my childhood haunt ( _both of them_ ) is ( _are_ ) gone.

I am sitting in bed, and my lungs are working too hard, so with a conscious effort I slow my breathing, feel the dizziness slowly recede.

 _The labyrinth has tasted you._

 _Sometimes, it isn't safe to fall asleep._

I stare at the half-moon until I cannot hold my eyes open anymore because I am terrified to surrender to sleep.


	8. Chains

I was so caffeinated that I could barely feel my extremities, but my hearing was unaffected. I was taking my break, doodling flowers on the backs of old discarded flyers and junk mail as I stared at a little cup of soup that Esther had microwaved and plunked down on the table in front of me.

I'd protested that I could feed myself, but she just gave me an all-knowing look. "Your cheekbones could cut glass lately, you know that? And it may be in vogue these days, but I'm no particular fan of the look. Eat the soup." I picked up a spoon and dipped it into the broth, ladled it into my mouth. Salt burned my tongue, acrid and caustic, but I managed to swallow to convince Esther to leave the room. Then I'd picked up the pen.

The moment that Jen strolled into the shop, I burst through the door of the breakroom to try to beat her to Esther. To no avail.

"Jennifer, how lovely to see you!" said Esther, her face breaking into a warm grin. The crow's feet at the corners of her eyes crinkle into deep-worn laugh lines.

"Hi, Esther." Jen leaned across the counter to give my boss a quick hug while I glowered at them both. "Listen, I need to borrow Sarah for a while. We're going to see someone about her condition."

"Haven't you been feeding her?" Esther asked.

"Don't be ridiculous," I snapped. "I'm not a child, I am a fully-functioning adult who can take care of herself, and I am standing right here. To that end, I have a job, and it is here, and these are my working hours, and Esther needs me to fulfill my contract as an hourly worker."

"Well," Jen said, winking conspiratorially at Esther, "Maybe not fully functional this past week. So what do you say, Esther? Can I steal her and take her back to the factory for an hour or two? I think she's still under warranty."

"Go, go," Esther laughed, waving the two of us off. "A little medical attention might do you some good." Jen took my arm delicately, careful to avoid the sore spots, and steered me out of the door.

"I told you I wasn't going," I hissed at her.

"It's not every day you can find a psychiatrist with an opening in her schedule for the next day, Sarah. When opportunity knocks, we have to answer."

"You don't find that suspicious? A shrink with a conveniently immediate appointment?" I regretted it as soon as the words left my mouth, hearing how paranoid it made me sound.

"What is that even supposed to mean? Do you think there's some greater conspiracy targeting you through the medical industry and me? What is with your distrust of anyone who tries to help you? Get in the car."

I obeyed, but this time I was the instigator of the car's stony silence. The one time Jen reached for the radio, I slapped her hand away. "Come on, Sarah. You have to believe that I'm only trying to help."

I refused to answer, turning to look out the window.

We pulled up at the private practice and Jen walked in with me and checked me in at the front desk. "I'm not a child," I muttered, made angrier by awareness that my body language was directly contradicting me. I crossed my arms over my chest. I _felt_ like a child.

"I know you're not, but we both know you were never going to show up to the appointment unless I chaperoned you. But I really think this could help you. Give it a fair try, Sarah. One session."

"Don't have much of a choice, do I?"

A couple of minutes passed. Jen picked up a magazine to show me the date on its cover. "See? Eight years old. Told you."

I blinked at her, unimpressed.

"Sarah Williams?"

Jen nudged me lightly in the ribs with her elbow. I rose and followed the woman back through the door. We entered a smallish wood-paneled room with beige carpeting, two brown leather couches facing each other, a coffee table between them with a pitcher of water and several plastic-wrapped disposable cups, a wall full of bookshelves, and a large picture window that looked out onto an overgrown lawn.

"I figured you'd have a desk and a clipboard or something," I said.

"If I need notes, I'll take them after the meeting," she replied, "and it's not very comfortable to sit at a desk all day. I'm Dr. Frechette. I understand you were a last-minute fill-in for my second-to-last-minute cancellation." She was short and rotund, with blonde hair pulled back into a chignon and a pair of glasses that rested neatly atop her head, dressed in a matching grey skirt and blazer.

We sank onto opposite couches and I tried not to feel so defensive. It wasn't Dr. Frechette's fault I was here. "I'm Sarah. I didn't actually make this appointment myself. My roommate made it for me."

"Do you prefer not to be here?" she asked.

"No, no, I mean, I'm here. I might as well go through with it."

"Is there anything in particular you want to talk about?"

"I don't really want to talk about anything. I've just been having trouble sleeping and kind of hoped you could help me out. Maybe there's something you can prescribe me? For dreamless sleep, I mean."

She appeared a little bit apologetic. "I'm afraid that's not really the way this works, Sarah. If that's the case, maybe you should see a general practitioner."

I sighed. "I think you're probably right, but Jen really wanted me to see a therapist or something."

"Do you want to talk about why she wanted you to do that?"

"I've been having these really vivid dreams," I admitted, "And sleepwalking a lot. I guess I'm getting a little bit paranoid, but I think Jen is way more worried about it than I am. It's sort of unfair to her, I guess, because it's been disturbing her life almost as much as mine." I thought about the candy bar and the soup. "And sometimes food doesn't quite taste right to me? Do you know what that could be?"

"That's not really my area of expertise," she said. "Do you want to tell me about the dreams?"

I rubbed the blunt end of my broken fingernail with my thumb, thought about the cuts and bites on my arms, the bruises below my shoulder. The flower on my desk, the photograph of not-me, the peach, the calla lilies crumbling to ashes in our living room.

"No," I said, "I don't think so."

"You don't think there might be something important about them? Some reason you're having them?" Her eyes were cornflower blue. She probably had a husband and a couple of squalling babies at home, and she probably never asked them questions like these.

"They're just dreams, right? Nightmares? I mean, I don't think dream analysis is scientific, right? It's probably irrelevant. Just my stupid brain going haywire."

"We don't have to talk about them."

"What do you want to talk about, then? My family? My troubled childhood?"

"Do you want to talk about your family?"

"I don't know. I don't think it has anything to do with my situation. My mom's a washed-up has-been actress who left before I hit puberty. My dad's disappointed in me for failing to make a career for myself. My stepmom's okay, but my half-brother won't talk to me anymore." _Not since his nightmares started keeping him up at night, and with the notable exception of creepy warnings that line up too well with the dreams I've been having. Also, there's a goblin king taking up residency in my head right now, and when he looks at me, I know I would do anything he asked me to, even though I don't trust him as far as I can spit._ "So, basically a textbook recipe for a headcase, I guess, except the only complaint I have is constant exhaustion. And my food tasting funny."

I saw her eyes fall to my unseasonably long-sleeved shirt. I swallowed hard.

"Oh," I said, "Also, I've been losing time."

"What?"

I shook my head, slowly, trying to clear the cobwebs.

Trying to figure out why it was Jen who had responded to my statement instead of my new blonde shrink with her leading questions.

I looked over, and there she was, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles. "So," I said, injecting my voice with false cheer, "that was good."

"Sarah, I know you were mad at me over it, but you didn't have to make a joke out of it."

"A joke?"

"You zombie-walked right out of there and into the car, and she just shrugged at me and called the next name."

"Oh. That was in poor taste," I said, trying to sound contrite. "So did she write me a script?"

"What do you mean, _did she write you a script_? Oh my god. Sarah. Do you not _remember_ the session?"

"I guess you heard me say I've been losing time," I said. "I just meant to say it to her."

"No," said Jen, "She did not write you a script."

She jerked the wheel, steering us into a fast food drivethru and ordered each of us a burger and a chocolate milkshake. Our occasional roommates-out late-night dinner splurge. When the attendant at the window handed her the bag, already splotched with grease and smelling like heaven, she tossed it into my lap.

"I want to see you eat that, Sarah."

"Don't you think we should start with something easy, like toast?" I asked, but I was already unwrapping one of the burgers, feeling my stomach beg and growl.

"So start with this easy milkshake," she said, handing over the drink tray and maneuvering the car into a parking space. I sucked up a mouthful of the thick chocolate shake, swallowed with some effort, smiled at her. I took a bite of the burger.

We continued this way: I choked down food under her evaluating gaze until my stomach bulged and the wrapper lay empty. "Good," she said, and drove us home as I flushed red, humiliated and taciturn in the passenger seat.

When we arrived home, my stomach was roiling. Despite a herculean effort to keep it down, I emptied the half-digested contents of my stomach into the toilet with the shower running to disguise the sound. Angry tears spilled down my cheeks as I stepped into the steam-blanketed water. I needed help, but I couldn't explain what was happening to me without sounding certifiably insane.

And maybe I was.

 _Are you so sure that yours is the authority to decide what is real?_

* * *

It is dark, so dark that my eyes have trouble adjusting. At first I think all of the stars have gone out, that time has run out entirely for everyone but me, but then I realize that this is the very sort of thought that he would find impossibly self-centered, given the enormity of the universe and the incontrovertible fact of my minuscule existence within it. A tiny square of very weak light is far above me, so indistinct that I'm not sure whether or not I'm seeing it or just wishing for it.

As my eyes finally start to filter through the darkness, I can see stone walls curving around me. This is a tiny little room. I've been here before. I know this place.

 _it's a place you put people to forget about them_

I know its name.

 _this is an oubliette - labyrinth's full of 'em_

I know that voice.

I know that I should not remember that voice if I want to escape him.

A light blossoms above me, blinding me for a moment with its gentle light. When I regain my sight for the second time, I can see it radiating from a perfect sphere overhead. By its light, I see a little door in the wall, and I lunge forward, half-remembering a little dwarf who opened it from several directions until he – we – could escape to the dungeon beyond.

A sudden stop: my wrists are cuffed to jangling chains, which are at the end of their reach as my fingertips just brush the splintered wood of the door, which is so small that even if I could reach it, I would have to crawl through on my hands and knees. I step back so that my arms can rest at my sides and consider. The chains are threaded through a metal loop in the wall overhead, come down and anchor in the ground.

The crystal is here. He will be here soon as well.

 _see, you've got to understand my position_

I shut my mind tight against the memory. I don't want to remember. I don't want to remember.

"Oh, but you should." His voice floats past where I am trying to close the mental door on my first run through the labyrinth. "It is always better to remember. We wouldn't want history to repeat itself, would we, Sarah?"

He slides swiftly from the shadows, inches from me, and I step back, tripping over myself to the harsh clinking of metal, to press against the wall behind me.

"You're so close, aren't you?" he whispers. Fluid heat unspools between my legs. He cocks an eyebrow, smirks, takes a single step closer. "Just give it one more little try, Sarah." He is dressed in a white shirt, unbuttoned, and a pair of brown leggings. He looks unpolished, as though he has arrived in a hurry.

"Weren't you expecting me?" I ask, and hope the look I am giving his outfit is critical. I want to offend his vanity.

"You were clearly expecting me," he returns, and loops his hand into the far end of the chains that bind my wrists. He gathers them, hand over hand, and my arms rise in response. I will not give him the satisfaction of struggling. I know his strength. When my wrists dangle, arms nearly fully extended above my head, he snags a link on a little hook in the wall to hold them there. "Now, Sarah," he says, "Be a dear and let your old friend explain why you've got to understand his position."

 _I'm a coward, and-_

I do not want to remember-

 _I'm a coward-_

I am a coward.

He is holding a riding crop in his hand. I feel redness blooming in my cheeks. "One ought always to thirst for knowledge." He extends it, runs it along the outside of my arm. "Look what the labyrinth has done to you," he murmurs, coming closer, touching the crop to the thorn-scars. "You are not a coward, Sarah. You have many flaws, but cowardice is not among them."

As I wonder if he can hear my heart fluttering in my chest, my treacherous mind finishes the thought, dredging it from where I'd buried it ten years ago.

 _I'm a coward, and-_  
-Jareth-  
 _-scares me._

My chest tightens painfully and my vision blurs. His grin is feral, victorious.

I have said his name aloud.

"That wasn't so difficult, was it? Now we're on even-footing, you and I." The crop runs down my side, rests at my waist, and then he pulls it back completely, touches it to his lips.

"Where is he?" I ask. "What happened to him?"

"From whence did you think the Bog of Eternal Stench derived its name?"

A non sequitur?

"From its stench?" I parrot dumbly. There is something lurking here. Something awful.

"But where, pray tell, did you think it procured its stench?"

I cannot guess, I haven't thought about the Bog in ten years, pushed it back into my memories, labeled it a silly and unsavory product of a fanciful imagination. I shake my head mutely, my mouth dry.

"Dear, sweet Sarah. You sealed his warrant with your kiss. I 'bogged' him, as he was wont to call it. There is no return. Your faithful friend Hoggle rests there even now: a prince of the land of stench."

I am struck dumb, head reeling.

He raises his hand, the perfect sphere of a second crystal suddenly nestled in his gloved fingers, touches it to my forehead.

In my mind's eye I see corpses, eyes empty and open, bloated with putrefying gases beneath the surface. I see it because he gifts the sight to me, because he wills me understanding. My stomach lurches with horrible comprehension. The bog's stench is death and decay.

The cruelty of Jareth accurately remembering Hoggle's name only after ending his life makes my eyes sting with tears.

"Your eyes are very green when you cry," he says.

I lift my chin to see the otherworldly cant of his head. His mildly curious expression makes him seem benign and just a little bit confused, disguising the jealous, murderous king I now know him to be. I hiccup, feeling like the gawky teenager of ten years' past.

"You're a murderer."

"I'm a king. Some would say the two are one. You, Sarah, would not, for willful ignorance has ever been one of your vices."

I can say nothing.

"I think," he says thoughtfully, tapping the crop against his chin, "that this has been enough for tonight. Your time in the oubliette has been most productive - and ironic, don't you think, that a place named for forgetting should be the flint that finally sparks your memory?"

* * *

I am standing before the window. My hands are pressed flat against the glass. The rose on the desk is dead.

 _its beauty was fleeting_

The shape of his name is molded to my lips.


	9. Maze

"I just want everything to be perfect."

The Johnson bride was a crier. I tried not to yawn too widely, burying my nose in the binder of notes that Esther had slid across the table to me so that I could look a little more like I had some idea of what was going on. Peonies.

Esther nodded, smiling beatifically. "And it will be."

The blonde bride wore a pale blue sheath dress that hiked to mid-tanned-thigh when she sat, and her mascara was clearly waterproof because nary a smudge marred her eyes as she wiped tears away. I was briefly thankful that I'd at least remembered to ditch my sneakers for flats in the name of professionalism, but I knew my shirt was already soil-streaked even though the meeting had started at 9:00am.

Jen had to drive me to the shop this morning because we'd never picked my car up after yesterday's disaster. So I had to be to work before she had to be to work, and she had to be at work at 8:00am. At 7:30, I'd found myself alone in the greenhouse and got to work. It wasn't difficult for me to wake up with her this morning. I hadn't been able to sleep at all since waking from the oubliette.

My eyes brimmed at the memory of Hoggle. The bride looked at me gratefully, misinterpreting my grief for wedding-emotion empathy. It was the first time she'd sent any goodwill my way; my dark-ringed eyes and waiflike appearance were clearly not engendering her confidence.

My heel stung where my shoe had systematically rubbed away the skin. I always felt a little irritated by the speed at which the blisters were formed and then broken by any shoes that weren't my worn-in sneakers. I popped my heel out of the shoe. It didn't offer much relief.

"I just want peonies," she was insisting.

"They're a lovely choice," said Esther, "But it might be wise to use something a little less full for the boutonnieres. Carnations, maybe?"

"Do you think peonies will look silly on the groomsmen?" she asked, her face the very picture of concern. "Can we get smaller peonies for them? And I want corsages for our mothers."

I wished I had a pen so I could pretend I was taking notes. I had a perverse desire to sketch a few men in suits with flowers bigger than their heads pinned to their lapels. Maybe then the future Mrs. Johnson would see how ridiculous Esther thought it was for boutonnieres to be built around full peony blooms.

"Perhaps if we used the buds," Esther suggested. She'd brought a potted peony in to demonstrate. "See, here, if we gave it a little halo of baby's breath, it would make a lovely boutonniere."

"That would be fine for the groomsmen," the bride-to-be countered, "But I want something that stands out a little more for Jareth."

I visibly started, and the page of notes about color coordination that I'd been idly flipping back and forth sliced along my index finger. The tiny papercut beaded with a fine line of blood, and I popped it into my mouth. It tasted like soil and a little bit like Miracle-Gro. Our client stared at me, all warm thoughts of our former empathetic connection clearly vanished.

"What did you say your fiancé's name is?" I asked, trying to sound casual, slipping my finger back out of my mouth. "Sorry. Papercut."

"Jared," she said. "His name is Jared."

"Oh," I said. I felt giddy, couldn't bite back a crazy little laugh. "Of course. It's a perfectly nice name."

She stared at me, unsure whether I was making fun of her.

"I just thought you said something else. It sounded like the name of an acquaintance of mine, and I've never met anyone else with his name before. Honest mistake."

Esther glared at me from across the table. The bride looked back over at her, giving her just enough time to smooth out her expression, and I mouthed "Sorry!" across the table. She raised an eyebrow at me. I ran the pad of my thumb over the papercut, smoothing it shut.

"We can discuss the groom's particulars some more in a little bit, but right now I think we should talk table centerpieces. Were you planning on a sweetheart table, or having the wedding party all at one table?"

As the bride began a long and drawn out answer that somehow included a string quartet, I muffled a sigh in my sleeves. I should have been grateful for the chance that Esther was giving me to be more involved with large orders, but I was feeling crabby and nostalgic for the days when my job was simply to arrange the flowers. Responsibility is less alluring to me when it's yoked with administration. All I want to do is the art.

Esther hired me in the first place because I have a way with flowers. She likes to say that they're responsive to my touch, used to ask if I sang to them when she wasn't around. And sure, I have a green thumb, but plants are plants. Give them the right amount of water, a little extra food, a generous amount of sunlight, and they nourish themselves from there on out.

She thinks that I'm good with helpless things because I can water a plant. She used to encourage me to meet a nice boy, settle down and channel some of my nurturing spirit toward children, but I told her that was ridiculous. No one would think that caring for a plant could be equivalent to caring for a child. I can't tell her that I've already proven myself unsuitable to bring another life into either this world or the next. And children don't like me much. Never have, at least as far as I can remember.

Besides, my real source of pride is the arranging, when I sever the flower from its root just before its prime, nestle it prettily among others and leave them to bloom and then die in a paper-wrapped bouquet that some poor sop is going to take home to his wife in a hurry because he forgot their anniversary.

Then it will wither, living out its final days in a vase filled with dusty water, until the petals rustle dryly and fall, one by one, and finally it is marked for disposal, a worn-out metaphor for a worn-out relationship.

I could never have children.

"Sarah?"

My chin snapped up from where it had dropped against my chest. "Sorry?"

"I was just explaining to Amanda that maybe we should consider-"

Across the table from me, next to the blushing bride, he put his legs on the table, crossed at the ankle. Soft-looking heeled brown boots reached most of the way up his calves, giving way to tan breeches. His shirt was so blue it was nearly black, buttoned halfway up and falling open, a silver chain peeking from beneath it. His hair, in perpetual disarray; his eyes, crinkled with mirth. Here, in the shop, in the room, in the meeting.

"Esther!" I burst, interrupting. The bride didn't look over even as he ran gloved fingers tenderly across her throat. Had he been here the whole time? "Do you-"

He pressed a single finger against his smiling lips.

"What, Sarah?" she asked, giving up any pretense of patient accommodation.

I winced. "Never mind. I'm sorry."

"Do you need to go get some water?" Esther asked me, tightly.

That was my cue. I nodded, rose from the table where he sat beside our bride-client, still watching me as if the scene playing out before him was staged for his entertainment. The water from the sink in the breakroom never quite gets cold, but I ran it for a long time anyway, holding my fingers under the tepid stream as the seconds ticked by, Esther and Johnson-to-be talking in turns in the office.

The counter beside the sink has our collection of old coffee mugs and cracked plastic water bottles on it, even though the coffee maker at work has been inoperative for several months now. No one cares enough to buy another one. I reached back for a mug, feeling along the counter behind me. The water was barely cooler than room temperature.

A mug was placed into my outstretched hand. I couldn't have been less surprised. I took it, examined it. Slate blue on the outside, once white but now coffee-stained on the inside. A layer of dark sediment was caked on the bottom from many refills, few washes. A small chip was missing from the rim just above the handle.

I filled it in the sink, met his eyes. "What are you doing here? I'm not asleep."

"Are you certain of that?"

A long, slow sip wets my dry mouth. My body gladly accepts the offering. The water tastes only like water.

"It's very mundane of you."

"Mmm," he said. I couldn't tell whether or not he agreed.

I gulped the water down, trying to slake my thirst, and my parched throat loosened.

"Sarah?" called Esther, sharply. She was getting angry. I refilled the mug.

"I'm coming," I called, then addressed him. "Why don't you scare me here?"

"Why should I scare you? Don't you think that might simply be a miscalculation on your part?" His voice was darkly amused.

"No," I said, "I don't." And I walked into the office, hoping that this meeting was almost over. He followed; I heard the percussion of his boots on the floor behind me. I sank into a chair, and he rested his hands on my shoulders. I set the mug down on the table, held it with both of my hands, concentrating on the sensation of its cold ceramic and not on the gentle weight of his hands, his breath rustling my hair.

Esther talked and talked until I wanted to scream, wanted to tell our perfect blonde client that first her flowers would shrivel to nothing, and then her marriage would follow suit, and in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't matter whether the groom wore a peony or a carnation

 _or a rose_

and no one would remember the flowers except for her, when she has grown old and unlovable, flipping through a faded scrapbook full of glossy 5x7s, so maybe she should just take Esther's advice and let the professionals do their job to make her wedding day picture-perfect for that sad someday album.

"Sarah!"

I blinked. Had my thoughts been too transparent on my face? But Esther didn't look furious, she looked horrified. And I looked down, the weight on my shoulders evaporated, the breath on my hair gone, but a single drop of scarlet was diffusing through my mug of water like a diaphanous scarf, like a growing flame, like fog over the sea, and I was sawing the pad of my thumb across the jagged edge where the chip was missing from the rim of the mug, and it was slicing deeper and deeper, peeling my skin away, blood running in rivulets down the inside to join the first drop, down the outside to pool on the table.

The bride pressed her hand to her mouth.

Esther came around the table to me.

I lifted the mug to my lips, smearing blood on my chin, and drank greedily.

The bride rose halfway out of her chair, face white.

Esther took my wrists in her hands, wrenched the mug away from me. "I think you should go home, Sarah. Come back on Monday if you're feeling better." She practically lifted me out of the chair. I felt like a doll, like something other trapped in my body, trying to remember how to form human facial expressions to fit in with the locals. "Are you okay to drive?"

"Yes," I smiled sweetly at her. "I am."

* * *

I arrived home without incident. He did not appear in my passenger seat as I drove, his eyes did not materialize in my rearview mirror, though I checked constantly. The apartment was bright with late morning light.

Alone, I was frightened, even where I sat in the warmth of sunbeams streaming in through the window. My thumb pulsed. I examined it. The cut was deep and ragged, excruciating when I bent the joints around it. I extracted a bandaid from our dwindling first-aid kit, wrapped it around the wound. It was inadequate; the cut peeked out from both sides, red and angry, still seeping enough blood to immediately saturate the little cotton pad.

I brewed a pot of coffee, then another, then another. I considered trying to call Karen to see whether or not Toby would talk to me, but remembered that she had him away at day camp this week and he wouldn't be home until later this evening. My notebook sat abandoned on the side table, but I did not want to see the page I'd ruined last weekend.

Above all, though I was exhausted, I feared sleep.

I scalded my mouth with mug after mug of coffee until my heart thumped erratically in my chest.

A forceful knock at the door startled me so badly that I cracked my kneecap against the edge of the coffee table. I cried out in pain, began to rise-

The void in me cried out and the wildness wordlessly answered it.

* * *

My hair is loose, my white shirt has flowing sleeves, my jeans are dark and tight-fitting. It is nighttime, or maybe it is daytime, and I am not sure because the walls of the labyrinth tower so far above me that I cannot see the sky.

I walk.

The stone walls give way to an equally monstrous hedge maze. Torches flicker at each branch point, and at some points that aren't branches at all, but only look like they might be until I draw near. I hear a wailing in the distance.

A shock of blond hair races past the junction ahead of me, burnished gold in the flame. A red t-shirt, a child's giggle.

Toby.

"Hurry, Sarah," he says, "You have to find me. That's how the game works. You have to find me before you can catch me and take me home." Another giggle. The fading of scurrying feet.

"Toby, wait!" I cry, taking off after him.

He is always just ahead of me, close enough for me to glimpse the torchlight glancing off of his hair or the flutter of his shirt, too far for me to be able to close my fingers on his shirt, fold him up in my arms, tell him I love him, I'll never lose him here again. Tell him I've already learned my lesson.

"Toby!" I am anguish, exhaustion, bruised body and sore feet.

Still he giggles, and the sound reverberates until it is sometimes a cackle, sometimes a growl, always something sinister.

"Sarah, he's going to keep me here forever if you don't find me soon," Toby calls in a sing-song. I see his little body hunched in a sprint, fists pistoning at his sides, and then he has rounded the next corner.

I don't have enough breath to call for him again, but it doesn't matter because he isn't listening, is only winding deeper and deeper into the bowels of the labyrinth. I think of the long fall to the oubliette. I think of the bloodthirsty fairies and the forever-wall in the fog and the rosebush. I think of our home. Maybe he is running home.

"Toby?" My feet are sore, my chest is heaving, my knee hurts terribly. "Toby, please come back."

Nothing.

"Toby?"

A shadow flickers across the path. Another child's laugh. Following the sound brings me to a dead-end, and I stand next to the torch, its heat licking at my skin, drying it to parchment, urgency building in me to an unendurable height. Familiar wailing, off in the distance. Toby's laugh. I ball my hands into fists.

This is my labyrinth. He told me so.

"Let me pass," I say. My voice shakes. I have to find him. I have to save him. I can't lose him. I can't lose. " _Let me through, damn it._ "

The hedge rustles ( _shudders_ ) in response, and with a creaking that sounds as if the very stone beneath my feet is being rent in two, it opens, just large enough for a very small child to walk through. I drop to my hands and knees, crawl through it. Twigs catch at my hair, at my clothes, rake across my skin.

 _sometimes the only way forward is back_

The ground falls away beneath me and I have just time to wonder _why?_ and _what next?_ before I land hard, knocking the wind out of me.

"Shame on you, Sarah," he says.

The glow of the torch laps lazily across his sharp features: jawline, teeth, nose, cheekbones. Although the firelight is warm and golden, he seems devoid of color.

I hate him.

I catch my breath, brace myself against the floor with one arm, stand up to face him. We are at my starting point in the labyrinth, where cold stone gives way to green brambles.

"You should know better."

"If it's my labyrinth, I should be able to move through it as I please."

"By all means," he says, sinking into his mocking little bow and sweeping his arm out in front of us. "But do remember that the labyrinth does not like to be cheated."

"The labyrinth doesn't, or you don't?"

He doesn't answer, merely looks ahead.

A giggle. A blond head, a red t-shirt. "Sarah!" This time fear creeps into his little voice.

"The privilege of a second chance is afforded to few. You should not squander it."

I run into the shadows between torches, already gasping. My heart is a cold little knot in my chest, constricting with every step I take. I do not call to him. I see him round the corner, and I deliberately turn the way he did not go, and my pace slows, bit by bit, until I am walking. He cries out, sharp and scared. I see a scrap of red fabric caught on the hedge.

I walk forward and forward, following the sound instead of the visual. A scream, disappearing to nothing. The knot in my chest cannot tighten any further. Around the next corner, and the next, and the next, until the stone path drops away abruptly before me. There is a dark smear of blood at the edge.

It is as if I stand at the edge of the world, and I am deathly afraid. I peer down into the blackness. "Toby?" I whisper, but there is no answer. No laugh, no cry, only the constant undertow, the dirge of wailing in the darkness. He has fallen. He is gone.

Footsteps behind me.

"He isn't here at all, is he?" I ask. "He never was."

"Something that believes itself to be him is here," he says. "Does that trouble you?"

"I don't want to run the labyrinth," I say, and my voice is small. He cocks an eyebrow, tilts his head.

"You don't want to save your brother?"

"It isn't him," I say, "It isn't real."

"What is real, Sarah?" he asks. The constant inquiry, piercing me through to the knot that was once my heart. I am no longer confident in my ability to tell waking from sleeping or reality from fantasy.

If you can call this a fantasy.

"You aren't," I say, because I am sure that it is true, but as I say it, I am not at all sure that it is true, but that the very nucleus of the terror that perpetually demands my surrender is that he might be real after all, that something supernatural is happening here that can't merely be explained away as a figment of imagination or a fragment of a decade-old dream.

"So you continue to insist," he says. "I wonder what it will take to convince you otherwise." He steps nearer, then nearer still. I have to tip my head up to see him, and his eyes are mercurial, they are the gray-blue of the stormy sea.

He threads his hand through my hair, lifts it away from my skin, slides his fingers to cup the base of my head, supple leather against my flesh. A perversion of skin-on-skin.

But then, he's not human, so perhaps animal skin against mine is suitably sacrilegious.

A strangled laugh escapes my throat, and other than a brief flicker of his eyes upward, from my mouth to my eyes, he gives no response.

The knot that is my heart loosens, unfolds, beats, and I count it, silent percussion beneath my breast. I reach thirteen and don't have the presence of mind to even toss a sarcastic thought the number's way, because his head has bent to mine, long blond hair tickling across my collarbone, and then his mouth meets mine.

It's the first time he has ever touched me, and for some reason this is the only thought that I can identify in the fog in my head, and for some reason it surprises me even though it is something I have always known, that we have never touched ( _before_ ).

It is the first time he has ever touched me.

And where our lips meet, he is cold fire.

In every story I've ever read on the subject, the number of which is considerably higher than I'd be comfortable admitting, the sensation is heat and electricity, tingles running up or down spines. And to say that there's no heat is, strictly speaking, incorrect.

But it isn't his.

My mouth feels frozen, the pressure from his gloved hand cradling my skull drawing me closer, and I am dimly aware that even if I could break his hold and move away, I wouldn't. My heartbeat seems to slow, drawing closer and closer to the asymptotic stop. I feel the hang of it, the surety that it is flipping over, slipping closer and closer to a precipice, and I am trying to will it to continue beating, to pick its speed back up-

but he drinks from my lips, his other arm pressing against my already arched back, nudging my body inexorably into his, which is all sharp angles and pervasive chill, and I forget. My arms hang limply, uselessly at my sides because I cannot think of anything but him, he is crowding out even the anticipatory terror at my fading heartbeat as his lips fill my mouth with frostburn, ice threading down through my veins-

he raises his head, looks straight into my eyes, and starts to say something as my heart thuds loudly and rapidly, filling my ears with the pulsing of my own blood, weakening my limbs further. I sag bonelessly into his arms and he is bracing my body against his own, gaze insistent and, yes, cold but also intent, saying something-

* * *

" _Sarah!_ "

I open my eyes to see Jen's white, scared face hovering above where I am awkwardly slumped half-on, half-off the couch.

But I have a hard time concerning myself with her, because I can hear his parting words echoing in my ears now, and I don't know whether he was saying _come to me_ or _come for me_.

A sudden thawing of my body flushes me with heat that flows from my core. I know whichever it was, I will obey.

This time, it is not just his name that lingers on my lips.

It was a grave miscalculation to ever deign to think that he could have no power over me.


	10. Chalice

I walked to the kitchen on shaking legs.

"You're not going to talk to me about what's going on?" Jen asked. She was standing in the middle of the living room, one hand planted on her cocked hip, the other hanging at her side. "We're really not going to have a discussion about this?"

I reached into the cupboard for the economy-sized tub of coffee grounds.

"Really, Sarah? Really? Coffee again? It's seven at night, and you look like a zombie. Seriously, you look like something out of a low-budget horror movie. Stop with the stimulants. Go to bed."

The canister was far too light, offered me no resistance as I'd lifted it from the shelf, so I shook it, listening intently for any sign that its contents had not completely disappeared. "It's not safe to fall asleep."

"What did you just say?"

Easing the plastic lid off of the canister took more effort than I had expected. One of my fingernails bent backwards as I hooked them beneath the lip. I hissed in pain. The top flew off, clattering to the floor, and I lifted the container, tipped it into my hand. Not even a teaspoon of grounds trickled out, settling into a disappointing anthill in my palm. I groaned.

"Come on, Sarah, stop it." She took the canister from me, tossed it in the recycling bin, then took my hands. "What's going on? What happened to your thumb?"

"I cut it at work today. On a mug."

"You did that on a _mug_?"

"Esther sent me home." My head was pounding, headache building. I filled a glass with lukewarm water and immediately drained it, drawing the back of my wrist across my wet lips. "Do we have any aspirin? Or any more coffee?"

I remembered the coffee beans that I grind on the weekends and reached for them. Jen reached over and slipped the half-full bag from my fingers. "Stop!" she cried, "You have to talk to me. You have to tell me what's happening with you."

Reaching over for the beans, I snatched them back, poured them into the grinder, smiled innocently at Jen. "I'm sure it's just allergies."

"Don't be glib! I'm serious! Sarah, I came home to find you half on the floor, the door was unlocked and unlatched, you were convulsing like you were having a seizure or something. I don't know if I should try to figure out whether you had a stroke, I don't know if I should take you to the hospital. I don't know what to do, but I do know you don't need any coffee right now. You need sleep."

"I slept today, when I got back from work," I said brightly, "Hit REM and everything. I can afford to burn the midnight oil a little."

"That wasn't-"

I pressed the button on the grinder, sending the blades whirling, drowning out all of her words. After I had pulverized the beans into dust, I released the button. "Don't worry so much, Jen. You know what your problem is, you're a worrier. It's going to be the death of you, all that worrying." I feel my vocal cords tightening with suppressed, hysterical laughter.

"Just stop, Sarah," she said. "Stop. This is childish."

"She's right," he said. "Quite immature of you. What scares you so?"

"You," I said.

"What?" she asked.

"He's here," I said. I could feel my smile growing lopsided, threatening to slide right off of my face. I knew I looked terrible. "He's here, which means I'm dreaming right now, or that he's real, or that none of us are real and we're all just pawns on the chessboard of someone else's dream."

"I really cannot deal with this right now," she snapped. "I'll talk to you in the morning."

I set the coffee grinder aside as I heard her door slam. Avoiding sleep didn't seem to matter so much, because here he was in my kitchen. _Avoid sleep, avoid him_ had clearly proven itself a faulty hypothesis.

"If kissing me just now was supposed to prove that you're real, it didn't work. That was the least convincing kiss I've ever had the misfortune to receive."

"Why, Sarah," he said, "All I must provide you is reasonable doubt. Are you trying to provoke me?"

The truth is, yes. The truth is, I'm broken. The truth is, I might be fired from my job and my roommate thinks I'm crazy and I might be, but I don't care. The truth is, I want him to kiss me again and again, until my lips crack and bleed, until I understand what he is and what I am and what it all means or at least until I finally lose what's left of my mind. The truth is, I tire of going back to a life that is held together only by wishes and prayers and it's his fault.

The truth is, my life isn't what I expected it would be when I was fifteen and full of hope. And I can't suss out whether it's because I was too naive or because I have settled for next-best too many times.

"No," I said, but when I looked up, he was gone.

"Yes," I said. No one answered.

I contemplated saying his name, seeing if he would respond. But I didn't really believe he'd been there at all. Not at all.

The clock read 10:30.

Losing my drive to brew the coffee, I left the grounds still in the grinder, set it down on the counter, padded quietly to my bedroom, stripped off my clothes and climbed into pajamas. My knee was swollen, pink and puffy, a vivid red crease across it where I'd hit the table. I crawled into bed, pushed all of my pillows up against the headboard and leaned up against them. Drawing my knees up to my chest, I hugged them, rested my chin on my good knee, and stared out the window.

The moon was growing fuller.

I sat and I waited. Why was I seeing him on this side?

 _Jareth._

I waited to see whether or not he would grab me and pull me down into another horrifying dreamscape, emboldened by his named presence in my mind, but the room and I both remained undisturbed. I was the thin, untouched ice across a dark mountain lake, able to offer very little protection against my own untold depths. I was afraid to explore them.

Something in my subconscious stirred as I faced the night. The wind whistled through the shutters, in the eaves. I shivered, drew the covers up around my shoulders, leaving the foot of the bed bare. Touched fingertips tentatively to my lips.

Hummed the melody of a lullaby, and as the sound of my voice floated above the howling of the wind, I slipped down into slumber.

My sleep was dreamless.

* * *

I woke, for the first time in over a week, to full sun beating in through my window. My room was uncomfortably warm, and the sheets that I was wrapped in were damp and uncomfortable. I sat up, felt a bead of sweat gather and then trickle down between my breasts.

The air in the room was stale and sour. I threw the window sash wide open, breathed deeply. Judging by the height of the sun in the sky, Jen was long gone, off to another day of filing papers at work.

 _Jen_. Guilt welled up in the pit of my stomach when I thought about the way I'd treated her yesterday. She was right to worry about me. I resolved to be kind to her when she came home from work today, to try to assuage some of her worries about me. I'd been in a terrible mood yesterday, but I shouldn't have been so caustic.

I stepped out of my pajamas, walked naked to the bathroom.

In the mirror, my eyes were huge and luminous, too big for my shrinking face, sunken and circled with heavy dark shadows. My cheekbones, as Esther had mentioned, were jutting out from my face. My complexion was paler than ever. The cuts on my arms and hands and knees all looked as fresh as though it hadn't been a week or even just a few days since they'd occurred.

Not that it was reasonable that they existed at all, given that many of them had been incurred in dreams and had crossed over to my conscious hours.

The bruising on my upper arm was still dark and vivid, a shock of color on white skin, still obviously from the too-rough grip of a strong hand. My ribs were visible. My hair was wild and snarled.

I turned the shower on, this time as cold as I could stand it, and I shivered while I worked shampoo into my tangled hair, sudsing it up, combing my fingers through it, humming the lullaby again even though it was high noon and sleep had never been further from my mind.

* * *

When Jen came home, she barely looked at me. She stepped out of her shoes, dropped her keys on the shelf, set her bag by the door, but her eyes slipped right over me, her mouth tight.

I was a little bit irritated with her, myself, because she had removed all of the coffee from the kitchen. I'd stayed awake throughout the day well enough without it, vigilant of time passing while I remained firmly within it. Maybe it was simpler to stay present when the withdrawal headache was chaining me to this body in the here and now.

The day passed uneventfully, and by the time her key turned in the lock, I had been lying across the couch reading an old compendium of fairy tales for several hours. Its cracked spine had caught my attention from the shelf and when I cracked it open, I'd been hoping to read something that would help me understand how to proceed. Maybe there was something about goblin kings in it.

When Jen started to move toward the kitchen, the mermaid had just cast herself on the sea, becoming foam because she couldn't bring herself kill her lover. Such a pure heart.

"If I was the little mermaid," I said, "I would have bathed my feet in the prince's _bride's_ blood, and if that didn't work, then I guess I'd be all right with being foam. As long as I could take him along for the ride. I mean, he wasn't that great if he couldn't figure out to love her, especially after stringing her along and pining for someone else, but love is love, huh."

Jen paused, her back to me, and then sighed. "You know, Sarah, opening with a morbid discussion of fairy tales isn't the best way to convince your anxious roommate that everything is okay. Anyway, it wasn't his fault. She pulled a drowning man from the sea and left him on the sand for someone else to finish his rescue. How could he have known?"

"I guess," I said, closing the book with a snap. "Do you think he knew about mermaids?"

"I don't know," she sighed, and sank down on the couch. "Sarah, I think you should see a doctor."

"I slept last night," I protested. "I think I'm improving. Let me have a day or two to see if things turn around. Let's order Chinese. I want lo mein."

* * *

This, at least, has not changed. Whether by my influence, or his, it is the same as I remember it.

I am sitting in a small circular depression, a sort of an inverse dais. Before me, his throne, and he in it. The floor is strewn with hay; the room is entirely constructed from grey stone, ancient and musty and empty except for we two.

He reclines there, far above me, a black jacket thrown carelessly over the side and he in brown breeches, black boots, white shirt.

"Do you believe in me yet, Sarah?" he asks. The room's acoustics are surprisingly bright.

The walls behind him are carved into waves. It is a disorienting backdrop to the scene before me. It makes my eyes feel as if they must constantly shift to stay in focus.

"I told you earlier. A kiss is not exactly concrete evidence for reality. Especially not _that_ kiss."

Of all of the reactions I might have expected from him, surprise is not one of them. "You told me earlier," he repeats, slowly, turning each word over on his tongue.

"In my kitchen."

"How domestic of us," he murmurs, "But I was not there."

"Suit yourself." I shrug, but inside, I am fuming. He has stripped away my discernment, my shrewdness, my sense of self, and now he is insisting that he isn't further blurring the line that separates the dreams here with him from the reality there with me.

He lifts an ornate silver chalice to his lips, and when he takes it away, his lips are stained dark. His eyes do not leave my face. He is ageless.

"Do you like poetry, Sarah?"

"Poetry?"

"Yes, Sarah. Poetry. Rhythm, aesthetics."

"It wasn't my strongest point," I reply, thinking of hours spent struggling over meter and symbolism. "Sometimes I want my words to just be words."

"Words are words either way," he says, pauses, drinks. The smell of the wine is heady, intoxicating. His lips are dark, his eyes are bright, his brow is smooth and strong. He stands in one fluid moment, androgyny personified in the careless swing of his hips, his arms. "I am partial to poetry."

Down the steps he comes, descending from his throne, approaching me slowly. "Will you drink?" He lifts the vessel to my lips, cradled in his hands, tilts it. I allow my lips to part and the wine flows over my tongue. It is sweet, too sweet, almost rotten. It burns all the way down my throat to where it pools in my stomach.

 _"The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees_  
 _The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas_  
 _The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor…"_

He trails off, eyes hooded, looking at my wine-stained lips. I wait for him to continue, but a half-smile exposes dangerous teeth, and he simply says "I'll come to thee by moonlight," his voice a hoarse whisper. "I have no desire to occupy your waking hours."

I want to demand who it was then, at my workplace, in my kitchen, wearing his eyes, his skin, his long, lithe body and sharp tongue. Instead, I offer him a wine-soaked smile. "You left me to my sleeping hours last night. I was expecting you."

I am poking a slumbering tiger. He draws closer, takes a lock of my hair between two fingers, brushes it away from my face. "Were you wishing for me, Sarah? You must only call for me. Perhaps I was more convincing than you will admit?"

"No," I say, emboldened by the warmth from the wine. "I was not wishing for you, and I was not convinced."

He leans in, takes hold of my chin and my eyes flutter shut at the nearness of him. I feel his breath on my lips, a hairsbreadth away. I am dizzy, intoxicated by wine, by him.

"Perhaps, Sarah," he breathes, "We shall have to try something new."

I lean in, ever so slightly, and he backs away, drops his hand from my chin. His smile is unkind. He is drunk on wine, with power. His hand closes around mine, and he brings it to his red, red mouth. His lips touch the tender webbing between my fingers; his teeth scrape against it. My hand twitches in his grasp. Its newest wound pulses in time with the heat slinking its way south from my stomach.

A pause.

His fingers sweep over the deep laceration. "This isn't one of mine." He presses a kiss to the pad of my thumb; it throbs in response. His tongue wets his lips. "It tastes of madness, Sarah."

My mind is coming unhinged, both here and there, but here everything is clearer, mind and body.

"I warned you not to lose yourself to the labyrinth."

His voice is neither sad nor regretful. There is a strange strain of pleasure through it, but it doesn't surprise me that he should relish the thought. It is, after all, his domain.

"Maybe I'm not lost," I say, because I want him to stop smiling. I ascend the steps to the throne, seat myself on it. It is uncomfortable, all sharp edges and angles draped in purple velvet, and I think that being king is maybe not so wonderful after all. He watches me, all catlike eyes and feline grace. "Maybe I'm just playing the game."

His smile widens.

 _when the wind blows, the cradle will rock_  
 _when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall_  
 _and down will come_  
 _baby_  
 _cradle_  
 _and all_

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Jareth is quoting from the poem _The Highwayman_ by Alfred Noyes, which was a particular fascination of mine when I was younger. It seems to me to be the kind of poem that would strike his fancy.


	11. Cradle

The unlatching of my door roused me from where I lay, lethargic, beneath a slate-grey sheet.

"Hello," I murmured.

"Morning," she said quietly, handing me a plate. Melted butter pooled invitingly in the crumb of a thick slice of toast, and saliva echoed its pooling beneath my tongue so suddenly that I felt a stinging pain in my jaw. "I'm not going to watch you to make sure that you eat that, but I really think you should. I also brought you water and some aspirin, because without coffee, you're going to have a hell of a day."

I sighed, extracted my other arm from beneath the sheet and picked up a section of toast. She'd cut it crosswise into triangles. I dropped it back to the plate and let her tip the white pills into my hand. Bitterness flooded my mouth as they began to dissolve on my tongue. I took a sip of water, swallowed them with some effort. One of them stuck in the back of my throat, acrid and chalky. I drank more water, finished the glass.

Jen offered me a weak smile. "I'm going out to run some errands. You should come along. Brush your hair."

I'd attempted to find something to lessen the dark circles beneath my eyes, but the only concealer I owned had long since dried up, cracked and curling in the bottom of the bottle when I lifted it up to my eyes.

"Come on, Sarah, I don't have all day."

I brushed mascara onto my lashes, a rosy glow along my cheekbones, braided my hair. I looked nearly functional, several steps further away from death warmed over.

We didn't talk much in the car. She changed the radio station every few seconds, even when it found a song that we both knew and liked, but Saturday radio was mostly talk shows anyway. Neither of us had the patience to listen to someone else's banal chatter.

"You're not taking me anywhere surprising, are you?" I asked.

"If you're asking me whether I'm taking you against your will to a doctor, the answer is no," she said. "Fool me twice, shame on me. I just need some new work clothes. Did you sleep last night?"

"I don't know," I said, picking at one of my remaining intact fingernails. "Maybe a little. Not a lot."

We stopped at a department store, where Jen filled her arms with blouses and slacks and walked off to the dressing room. "Don't do anything stupid, okay?" she said before she left, but her eyes were soft, so I nodded, walked over to the display of sunglasses next to a tall, spindly mannequin.

I selected a grossly-oversized pair, perched them on my nose. They overwhelmed my face, plastic green tortoiseshell frames pressing into my cheeks. The tiny square of a mirror set into the display reflected my face, and I pulled the sunglasses down to the tip of my nose, considering. My eyes, highlighted by the frames, were vibrantly green, almost glowing. I winked at myself.

She bared her teeth at me in a flawed facsimile of a grin. "The hourglass is nearly empty." I felt the words grind in my mouth.

"Shut up," I muttered, replacing the glasses on the rack. Wandering further into the store, I found myself standing near the makeup counter. A young woman with a shock of red-blonde hair smiled at me, asked if I needed help.

"I need lots of help, but I think it might be a little outside of your area of expertise," I mumbled, thinking of my twin in the mirror.

"Sorry, what was that?" she asked. Salespeople are always eager to please. "I know we could do something about those dark circles!"

I was tempted by the promise of a disguise for my sleeplessness.

"Sure," I said with a little shrug, and approached the counter. She swatched different foundations across my arm - I was careful to give her the one that hadn't been etched by thorns, keeping my sleeve rolled down over the elbow where the tiny bite mark refused to heal. The feeling of her warm hand at my wrist, the glide of swabs across my arm helped me to sink into drowsiness.

"I think we've found one!" she said brightly, holding up a bottle. The liquid inside sloshed as she gave it a little shake. "It's called Porcelain. Isn't that nice? Just like a little doll."

I thought of the dolls lined up along a shelf in my bedroom at Dad and Karen's, blank-eyed and long-lashed.

"Here, I'll just," she trailed off, wetting a small sponge and dabbing it along beneath my eyes. The sudden nearness made me blink. Her finger slid across my skin, blending quickly but carefully. "Perfect!" she said, "look!"

She spun the mirror on the counter around toward me, but I didn't want to look, didn't want to run the risk of seeing myself again.

"Sarah!" Jen called, "Come here, I need you to tell me what you think of this dress."

"That's my cue," I said, smiling at the girl across the counter.

Jen was wearing a wine-colored sheath dress with a deep scoop-neck that clung tightly to her body, ending just above her knees. "Do you think it's too much?" she asked, shifting her position to try to see it in the mirror.

"Too much for what? What's it for?"

"I'm showing some of my work in a local gallery," Jen said, color blooming faintly in her cheeks. "I would have told you, but I guess we've both been kind of preoccupied with other things lately. I want to wear something nice, kind of professional but that also screams something like 'delightfully quirky artist'."

"I don't know if it's quirky," I said. "Great cocktail dress, not too sleazy. You should get it whether or not you wear it to the show, but if you want to scream about quirkiness, maybe go a little more bohemian."

She nodded at her reflection. Behind her, I caught a glimpse of a white face, eyes sunken back in shadows. I thought it was me at first, but its hair was long and loose, flowing gently in a breeze that didn't exist here in the dressing room.

I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed my fingers to my temples.

"What's wrong?" Jen asked, turning to me.

"I think everything's fine." The face in the mirror was gone.

Jen smiled. "You look a million times better. Makeup counter fix you up? You should buy some of that stuff. We'll be able to go places again without people thinking you're a total druggie."

She was right, so I plodded back over to the counter and asked the attendant for the concealer. It was expensive, but if it would let me get back to work without scaring the customers, it was probably worth the purchase.

Her eyes widened as she handed it to me. I felt something cold poke into the small of my back.

Two tall figures flanked me, dressed all in black, scarves wrapped over the bottom halves of their faces. They said nothing, only pressed the weapon more firmly into my side and maneuvered me over to jewelry, began reaching into the display case, collecting pieces in a backpack.

"Stop," I said. My voice was small. "I won't do anything. I won't tell anyone."

One of them, the taller one, turned his face to mine, his eyebrows arched. One eye was entirely blue, the other was entirely black. My mouth fell open. "It doesn't matter who you tell," he said. His voice was oddly high.

I look over and the woman behind the makeup counter is chatting animatedly with a coworker from the perfume counter, entirely unconcerned with the robbery in process.

I look down and he is not cramming diamond-studded bracelets into the bag, but stuffed animals and children's books. He grows taller, thinner, eyes flat and hard. Everything here is cloaked thickly in déjà-vu.

I sigh heavily. "Of course it isn't real," and that's when he glides the knife through my shirt, across my skin, slips it between my ribs, deeper and deeper, and I feel nothing. His eyes burn strangely in the visible crescent of his face. I touch my fingers to the gash in my clothing, feel my blood pulse hotly over my fingers.

"Be careful what you choose not to believe, Sarah," he whispers, and then he is gone, and I am standing here, my heart pumping my blood out of my body, my fingers pressed to the hole in my chest, weaker and weaker with each spray of crimson.

Jen came up beside me, holding a bag. "I paid," she said, "let's go."

I collapsed to the floor, holding my knees to my hollow chest, expecting to bleed out and fade to black. But the floor was dry, dusty carpet unflecked by my blood, and the phantom pain in my chest burned white-hot, cauterizing itself, suddenly fading to nothing.

"Sarah?" Jen asked, scared. "Sarah, please get up. Come on, we're going home." She dropped her shopping bag, took hold of my arm, helped me upright. "I'm sorry, I thought it would be good for you to get out for a little while. Come on, we'll get you back."

It wasn't until she had tucked me into bed with a mug of tea and was making a phone call in the kitchen with her voice pitched low that I remembered the little glass bottle of concealer in my pocket, unintentionally shoplifted, so I padded out of bed and to the bathroom to set it on the vanity.

"I don't know what to do, Mom," I heard Jen say. "I don't know if I should just take her to the hospital. She seems lucid sometimes, totally fine, but the next minute she'll totally freak out. I can't figure out how to help her. I don't have time for this, I have my own life to take care of, but something's wrong with her."

I lifted up my shirt in the mirror, looked at the white skin over my ribs. A shiny red scratch, visible where the memory of the blade still sang. I touched it, ran my fingers across it. It disappeared.

Abruptly, I did not want to look at myself anymore, did not want to eavesdrop on Jen's conversation anymore, did not want to be conscious anymore. Returning to my bed, I buried myself beneath the blankets, drawing them tight around my ears until I could hear only the sound of my own breathing.

And then, despite my best efforts to stay awake, I succumbed to sleep.

* * *

I am aware of it, now, the brief feeling that all of my limbs are turning to jelly, the snap sideways to abruptly leave my corporal body for the fantastical.

Only this is familiar.

I hear an infant crying inconsolably and turn to look down the hall of the house I grew up in, place my hand on the brass doorknob that leads to my parents' room. I know that Toby is eleven now, that I am twenty-five and on my own, but here I am and there he is, just past the door.

It creaks open; I have to brace myself to push open the door, and as it slides inward, light from the hallway bleeds across the floor of the room. The windows are there on the opposite wall, I know they are, they must be there because I know this place like I know the creases on my palm, but there is no light from outside, no moon, no twinkle of stars, nothing but black as though the outside world has been snuffed out of existence and this is the only place that remains.

The light reaches the crib but instead of seeing the light wood of the crib, the crying baby in a candy-striped onesie, I see four silent shadows, tall and thin, reaching sharp talons toward my baby brother in the cradle, and the noise that he is making strikes terror into the marrow of my bones. I am immobile, my hand still clutching the knob.

The wailing turns rough and ragged. One of the shadows turns; it has no face but it sees me even without eyes, flies toward me, passing in and out of my vision, extending claws sharp enough to slice my skin to ribbons, flay it off my body.

They all flicker suddenly and disappear, leaving only Toby's sobbing to bounce hollowly off of the walls, reverberating. I step forward, once and once again, moving to the crib to scoop him into my arms and comfort him but when I get there-

 _forget about the baby_

He isn't in the crib. It is empty, neatly made, blankets stretched taut across the surface. Lancelot sits attentively in the corner. There is a bald spot on his head where I wore his fur off through years of cuddling. The crying fades away to a whisper.

I breathe.

A small divot rests neatly in the pillow, and I absently reach down to stroke it.

It is warm.

My head spins, an intense pain stabs just behind my right eye and I bring my hands to my face, pressing ice-cold fingers into my eye sockets in a desperate bid to alleviate some of the pain.

The screaming begins anew, so loud that my ears ring with the force of it. I drop my hands from my eyes and stare into the shadowy contour of a face inches from mine. My vision blurs, slides sideways, past the ghoul before me and there in the crib is Toby in his red-striped pajamas, another of the figures sliding a single uncurled talon deep into his defenseless chest.

His cry is cut off, strangled in his throat, replaced by a strange wet gurgling. There is no gash in his skin, no blood gushing from his tiny body, but something dark and not quite corporeal dribbles out of his slack little mouth, his tight fists relaxing into splayed fingers, his eyes blank, his chest still.

I hear whimpering and the ghoul in front of me draws back, extends claws, and-

The hallway light is too bright, and I stand blinking in the hallway, silent except for the whimpering and gibbering, and this time I am not surprised to find that it is me, because I am not in control of anything: body, mind, voice all skating beyond my reach.

The door to the master bedroom is shut and silent.

"No, no no no," I'm groaning, unable to stop the wail from my own throat.

"Hush," he says, and for the first time I realize that he is here ( _but of course he is here_ ), that he swept me from the room, that his arm is across the front of my shoulders, holding my back to his front. His dove-grey cloak laps at my ankles as I attempt to catch my breath.

"I didn't," I cry, "I didn't do it, I didn't wish him away."

"I know," he says simply, but his tone is accusatory. I will find no absolution here.

I try to wrench away from him, but his arm remains firm.

"What happened to him? Where is he? What were they?"

"What is it you're so fond of saying?" he asks, and wicked amusement bubbles beneath his voice. "It isn't real, Sarah."

Tears spill icily down my cheeks. I don't know whether I am relieved or petrified.

I don't know if I believe him.

This time when I pull away, he drops his arm. I rush forward into my own childhood bedroom, the canopied bed and cluttered desk just as I remember them. I need to find something, there's something here that's the key to the whole mess.

The door clicks shut behind me, quietly. The compulsion to rip the room apart in search of ( _what?_ ) is so strong that I forget the horror of watching my baby brother ( _die?_ ). There is no room for anything else.

"Looking for this?" he asks.

I see his face, wild and fierce, for the first time when I look over to see what he has found. He is a god-king, a mythical creature glorious with divine purpose. My chest constricts at the sight of his burning eyes, the cruel twist of his mouth, his rough-chopped thistledown hair.

From his fingers, he dangles a tiny figurine. I draw closer to him to look at it and see that it is a replica of him.

Is he making a joke?

"No," I say sharply, suddenly aware of the heat and color rising in my cheeks, of his presence in my younger self's inner sanctum.

A staccato laugh heralds his next question. "Are you sure it isn't what you're looking for?"

"Why would I be looking for a Goblin King action figure?" I spit, and he is now lounging on my bed, sitting on the rumpled white sheets.

"It isn't a very good likeness, is it?" His tone is conversational, agreeable. That he does not intimidate me in this moment gives me pause. I shuffle through old scrapbooks on my desk. "Really failed to capture - mm, everything, really."

I pause at a creased picture of me, about eleven years old, between my mother and father. It makes my heart hurt. It was another lifetime ago.

"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here," he intones in a sing-song voice, "to the castle beyond the goblin city, to take back the child that you have stolen." I look up from the photograph to see him reclining lazily into my pillows, legs crossed at the ankles, and he is reading from a little red leatherbound book.

 _take back the child_

"For my will is as strong as yours," he continues, but his tone is mocking, he has pitched his voice up in an unkind imitation of a young girl, and he looks up from the pages, all jagged smile, angry eyes, "And my kingdom as great."

 _the labyrinth_

"You," he says delicately while his eyes are sparking, burning into mine, "have no _power_ ," he pauses, inhales, runs a pink tongue into the corner of his lips, "over me."

A mysterious smile. "Is that truly how it ends, Sarah? There are many pages yet to be read."

It feels as though a fist has closed around my heart. "Give me the book," I manage.

"Why, Sarah, that's not your line," he says, and it's hunger that flashes across his face now. "Where's our intrepid heroine? 'Give me the book' smacks of self-interest. You're meant to be the selfless archetype. 'Give me the _child_ ,'" he insists.

"Give me the book," I repeat. He doesn't seem so dangerous now, not with laughter curling into his voice.

"Take it." He extends his hand, book held between his thumb and forefinger. I reach out, but when I take it, it is not the little book at all, but the music box, the tiny ballerina clad all in white who twirls and twirls. She grinds slowly into action, turning, her full skirt flaring, and the music plinks, slowly at first and then tinkling a melody that awakens something long since buried deep in my unconscious-

I've never lost time in a dream before, though I guess I wouldn't know, but as I look at the music box, I feel myself begin to unspool. I am not cold, I am not afraid, I am not trapped in a pocket of time existing outside of the continuum-

The sheets are tangled around my legs, my hair loose and strewn across the pillows, my limbs feel so heavy, the bed is so soft.

His laughter is low and throaty, brimming with unspoken promise. Looming above me, he slips the tiara from my desk over my hair, and it feels cool and heavy rather than the cheap plastic I know it to be.

"A crown befitting my intended," I hear him murmur, and then his weight settles over me, pressing me firmly into the mattress. My eyes flutter closed ( _I can't look_ ) as the warm, supple leather of a glove brushes along the side of my face, combs itself through my hair to send goosebumps racing across my scalp.

Danger emanates from his electric touch, cold and hot all over.

"It compliments your lovely gown," he says, and I hadn't considered it before but now I am aware that I am wearing a thin silk nightgown. It was a gift from my mother on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, exquisite but also completely wrong for a girl blossoming into a woman. A nightgown for a little girl who hasn't outgrown fairytales.

I remember it well enough that I don't have to open my eyes to know that it is white with palest blue ribbons tracing the scalloped neckline.

I've never worn it.

His knuckles brush along the exposed skin of my collarbone and then south, along the border of silk and skin. I breathe shallowly, my lips parted and dry. The mattress tilts below me as he shifts his weight, nudging my legs apart with a knee, settling his thigh between mine in the folds of the skirt.

He says nothing and I say nothing, heart fluttering like a moth toward his flame, knowing I will be extinguished when he finally touches me. His chest presses into mine; I feel the roll of his weight onto an elbow, that hand snaking around to curl its fingers into my hair at the nape of my neck and knot them there, the other holding my chin. He is probably daring me to open my eyes, keeping my face in line with his, but then-

An agonizingly slow movement.

He brings himself up and over me, pulls my hair sharply to bring my chin up, and his leg comes forward, nestles neatly up into the cleft of mine. Heat pools, coils low in my stomach, and I draw a sharp breath, his thigh pressing the slipperiness of the fabric against the slickness between my legs.

To my frustration, he doesn't move his leg again, but bends his head to my neck, exposed by his too-strong hands still holding my head. His hair trails along my clavicle, leaving ultrasensitive flesh in its wake, and his lips touch where my heartbeat pulses in my throat, betraying me, and the kiss is flame lapping gently at my skin but the answering within me is ice crystallizing in my veins. A shiver runs the length of my body.

His fingers tug painfully at my hair, making me recoil, shift my body, dragging my hips against him and sending shockwaves up my spine, into my brain, down my arms. He obligingly pushes his leg against me in response to a low moan that I cannot bite back. His lips trace fire up to my jawline, just below my ear, his breath ghosting gently against my skin.

"Delicious," he hisses. His teeth rake my earlobe.

My mind distorts and I shudder, shift needfully against him, pressure building in my chest, breath coming in quick pants. I don't need the book. I need release.

Laughter puffs against my cheek, and he rocks back onto his knees, lifts himself until we are no longer touching. His hands are spaced around my shoulders, his knee pressing into the bed through my gown, the material pulled tight, restraining my legs. I am beyond anger, beyond anything but wild, desperate anticipation, but I blindly reach up to take hold of his forearms, curl my fingers into the silk of his shirt, praying that he will come back, finish what he's started.

"Ask nicely, dear heart," he says. His voice is rough, viciously amused.

I groan, eyes still shut; he gathers both of my wrists into one unthinkably strong hand, pins them into the pillows above my head. My bones grind uncomfortably against each other as I struggle to pull free, clench my teeth, feel my arousal recede and then surge forward again, stealing away what little breath I still have.

"What do you want, Sarah?" he asks cruelly. "Use your words."

The hand that is not restraining my arms trails a maddeningly light path down my neck, down the side of my breast. I inhale and hold it there, waiting, and he brushes his fingers in diminishing circles until they graze my nipple. A spark of sensation - he gently closes two fingers on it-

a twinge so strong it is painful flares in my sex, and before I can stop myself-

"J-jareth, Jareth, _please_ ," I sob, and apparently this is close enough to using my words because-

his hand drops, faster than light, slides up my thigh beneath the thin ( _wet_ ) fabric of my nightgown, expertly touches - just so. I gasp.

"Why, Sarah," he says. "Naughty, naughty thing."

I can feel how slick his ( _still-gloved, how can he still be wearing gloves_ ) fingers are as they dip into me, how easily they trace patterns in and around my most sensitive flesh. I am soaring, mind drowning in ecstasy, feeling strangely empty even as I exult at the catch of leather fingertips on my clit; my body jerks against him in immediate response and even though my eyes are shut ( _I can't look_ ) I can see him smile wickedly.

His fingers circle once, twice, I lose count abruptly, up and up and up, pulling against the unyielding hand around my ( _leatherbound_ ) wrists, desperate for more pressure, a kind of sickness building in my stomach as my entire abdomen begins to knot and clench, pulling in on itself, an inward unraveling but I can't quite-

" _Please!_ "

"Look at me, Sarah," he commands, voice like thunder, and my eyes obediently ( _treacherously_ ) open to see his face ( _terrible and beautiful_ ), eyes like stormclouds in an otherwise strangely placid expression, as if he were only inspecting me, as if his fingers weren't working me over, steadily pushing me closer and closer to the apex-

a fraction more pressure - agony-

my teeth sink so deeply into my bottom lip that my tongue is flooded with the coppery tang of blood-

I shrink and tighten to a pinprick of light - I exist only where he touches me-

something raw and desperate and profane bursts from my throat as my orgasm explodes through me like lightning-

* * *

With a gasp, my eyes fly open.

I am in bed. I am in bed, in my apartment. I live with here with Jen, barely able to make rent and utilities every month. I am wearing an old t-shirt and a pair of underwear.

His face is painted on the backs of my eyelids, wicked grin and blazing eyes as I beg and he shoves me over the edge, sending my synapses firing in chaotic rapture.

Brings me to climax in my childhood bedroom, beneath the white canopy, in the white sheets, under the watchful button-eyes of my well-loved toys.

My lip throbs where I've bitten deeply into it. I am cold and damp, panties soaked, pressed damply to my skin. The room smells like sex. My heart patters pitifully against my ribs.

Even in the moonlight, I can see blue-black bruises ringing my wrists.

I breathe.


	12. Water

I slept fitfully through most of the day, tossing and turning, dimly aware of Jen's knock at my door once or twice.

"Sarah, are you okay?"

I groaned. "Fine."

"I'm going out. Are you going to be okay by yourself?"

"I'll be fine."

There was something I needed to remember, something from the dream last night.

Every time I cast my mind back, that slick heat floods between my legs, raising patches of bright color in my cheeks, making my hands shake at the memory. His eyes, his teeth, his lips both hot and cold against my skin.

The memory of his gloves against me stokes the flames higher, fueling them with my shame.

The key to escaping my ever-tightening cycles of waking and dreaming, dreaming while waking, waking while dreaming is there somewhere, but every time I think back all I can see is his face, his halo of hair, all I can hear is his voice while his hand and hips pin me down-

 _use your words_

 _look at me_

I found myself struggling not to slide my hand down my own body to replicate, to better remember the trace of his touch, the ecstasy-fear at the moment of explosive fragmentation. To try to put out the flames.

It pleased him when I said his name. There had been raw hunger etched into the very lines of his face.

 _No_ , said something inside of me, something small and still. _That will never help you remember._

The key to what's happening to me - the instruction manual - I need to close the door on this extended nightmare, I need to close

 _the book_

I need the book.

I threw back the duvet, the sheets, showered, plastered my wrists with concealer, used it to erase the circles beneath my eyes. Sarah Williams is alive and well. She walks, she talks, her skin is white and unblemished, she's the very picture of health.

My car was sluggish to start, engine turning over reluctantly, growling and sputtering. I turned the key, held it there as the engine protested, feeling as if I was smothering it, torturing it into obeying my command. When it finally roared to life, I yanked it into gear and flew down the highway, back to the town where I grew up.

Karen came to the door in response to my impatient knocking, wiping flour-covered hands on her apron. She's the only person I know who wears an apron, but when I've told her this in the past, she only laughed and pointed out all of the laundry she saves herself by not splattering ingredients on her good clothes.

"Sarah!" she greeted me, "You should have called! I didn't know you were planning to join us for Sunday dinner."

"I wasn't," I said, "but here I am. What's for dinner?"

She stepped back so that I could enter the house, closed the door behind me, kissed my cheek. "I'm making bread right now. We'll have it with lasagna, but dinner won't be ready for a few hours yet. Of course we're happy to see you, but I hope you're not in a hurry. You could have called and I would have been able to tell you what time to come over."

"Don't worry about it. Do you need any help in the kitchen?"

"No, dear, I'll be just fine."

Karen never needs help with dinner. We are all constantly underfoot when in her domain, and she doesn't appreciate the company.

"I'm just going to run upstairs. I think there's an old book in my room and I'd like to have it back. You know, sentimental reasons, childhood nostalgia. I can't remember how it ends."

"Of course," she said, already returning to the kitchen. "Everything is just the way you left it."

That's what I'm afraid of.

I ascended the stairs slowly. I heard Toby tinkering with something in his room, but I moved past his door without calling to him. My door stood slightly ajar.

I pushed it inward with my fingertips, and it glided smoothly open until it stopped neatly against the wall. My bed was unruffled, sheets pulled tight, white coverlet unwrinkled. Teddy bears and dolls sat on the shelves, nestled in their little cubbies above the bed. Someone had vacuumed recently, and the tracks were still set in the carpet, reaching just past the dust ruffle around the bed.

I picked up the little music box with the tiny ballerina and wound it, watching her slowly begin her pirouettes. The tinkling song was jarring, familiar but completely unexpected; it was from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and predictably, it was the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. Setting it down on the little vanity before the mirror, I drew a long breath, held it, released it slowly.

No sign of the miniature goblin king all decked out in his armored regalia. I wondered if Toby had taken it.

The little closet held only my old, unwanted clothes, laundered and neatly organized, hanging above rows of lightly-scuffed shoes. I had been hoping for stacks of books, but this was clearly the work of Karen, who hadn't been able to restrain herself from neatening the place up "just a little bit." It felt entirely foreign to me.

I tore apart the bookshelf, setting everything in little piles on the floor, but it was the same collection of fairy tales and high fantasy and occasionally science fiction that I remembered from my childhood. In fact, if I had made a list of the books that I had loved as a child, every last one of them was here. All except the little red book with the play about a goblin king who stole away a baby, and the baby's sister who rescued him from the king's labyrinth.

It had to be here. I had seen it in my dream; I remembered it from ten years ago, running lines from it in the park in my mother's old white gown over grass-stained jeans. I knew that it had existed, but I couldn't find a trace of it in my room.

I sank into the window seat, my back against the wall where it jutted out, and looked out across the park. There was the little stone bridge, the little stone bench, the little stone path. There was the white swan. A little girl on the bridge was tossing breadcrumbs to it, which was drawing a crowd of ducks as well. Each time they paddled too close to the swan, it reared back, extending its wings and whipping its head on its long neck, and they retreated in a flurry. Beyond the park, I could just make out where the stream feeds into the river that winds itself from here all the way past my current apartment and on and on, still cold and turgid from a particularly rainy spring.

Returning my attention to my old bedroom, I noticed a corner of something protruding from beneath the dust ruffle, and fell to my knees to pull it out. It was an old scrapbook of mine: clippings of my mother from the newspaper, snapshots of me at various ages, old movie ticket stubs. As I flipped the pages, more and more pictures were of me with Toby, smiling at him, holding him close.

I didn't see the picture of me with my mother and father.

Returning to the bed, I lifted the ruffle and peered beneath it, hoping to find the red leatherbound book that he had dangled in front of me in my dream. There was a flat, ovular box, and I caught it with my fingertips, slid it out from under the bed.

I remembered it, of course. This was the gift from my mother, the white satin, blue-trimmed nightgown. It had come in a cushioned white box with a blue satiny ribbon around it, but the ribbon was gone now. I brushed the dust from the lid and it fell, thickly, to the floor.

Easing the lid off, I picked up a small card. " _To Sarah, on the occasion of her sweet sixteenth birthday: a present for my princess. I love you so. Mom._ "

I peeled back layers of crinkling white tissue paper to reveal the soft, glossy fabric of the nightgown. I ran a finger along it, toying with the ribbon. I had never even lifted it from the box.

"Sarah?" My head snapped up. Toby was standing, framed in the door. "What are you doing here?"

"Hey, Toby," I said. "I came over for dinner." I offered him a friendly smile and set the box aside.

"No, you didn't," he said, seriously.

"I was just looking for some stuff I had once." I patted the bed next to me, but he remained in the doorway, one hand closed around some kind of build-it toy. "Have you seen any of it?"

"What are you looking for?"

"I used to have this little action figure. Did you borrow it? I won't be mad."

"You never had action figures," he said, his brow wrinkled in distrust.

"Well, I had one, once."

"Who was it?"

I paused. "Well, it was a blond man, dressed all in black."

His eyes narrowed. "You shouldn't be looking for him."

"What?" I asked, shocked, "I shouldn't be looking for who?"

"You know who, Sarah."

"Did you take the toy?"

"No." He was obstinate, lower lip protruding. "And you shouldn't be looking for him anyway."

"Toby," I sighed, "I don't even know who you're talking about. I think there must be a billion blond guys wearing black that they made into action figures."

"Maybe. But you're looking for _him_ , and you shouldn't be."

I drew in another long breath, held it, released it. "Toby, what were you talking about the other night on the phone? When you said it isn't safe to sleep?"

"I shouldn't have to tell you this, Sarah," he said, and he sounded far older than his eleven years. His blue eyes were wide and solemn. "When you dream, he can find you, and when he finds you, he can trick you. And if he tricks you, you might never come back."

"How do you know that?"

"From _my_ dreams," he said, and then he turned and walked away. "He can't find me, but they told me that he can find you. They say you aren't being careful. They say he's going to get you soon."

"Who?" I asked him. The air in the room suddenly felt unbearably stuffy. "Who says that?"

"The _goblins_ , Sarah," he burst, "and if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have to talk to them at all!"

His door slammed, and I was left sitting alone on the edge of the bed.

* * *

Toby didn't talk to me at all at dinner. He pushed his food around on his plate the way he always does when we eat together, staring intently at it as if he was hoping that no one would ask him to say anything.

No one did.

We ate in silence, the occasional clinking of forks against plates interrupting the soft sounds of chewing. I lifted a forkful of lasagna to my lips. It tasted normal, the way that food ought to taste, and I allowed myself a little smile as I swallowed. Maybe coming here had been the right thing to do. Maybe I was going to solve the mystery here, tonight.

"This is really good, Karen."

She smiled at me. "It's nice to have you here for dinner, Sarah. I don't think we've had you back at the house in a couple of years. Sometimes it's nice to eat a home-cooked meal, isn't it?"

I didn't have to fight to return a grin. "Especially when it's cooked by you."

"Did you find whatever it was that you were looking for upstairs?" Karen asked me, slicing a piece of bread from the still-steaming loaf.

Toby looked up.

"No," I said, "I didn't. But maybe you've seen it. I'm looking for a little red book called _The Labyrinth_."

Karen shrugged. "I tidied up your room just after you moved out, but since then I haven't done anything but dust and vacuum. If I've seen it, I wouldn't remember."

"Why do you want that book?" Toby asked.

"I want to know how it ends," I said. "I can't remember. Dad?"

My dad was sitting at the head of the table, reading the newspaper. He looked up, ruffled it, set it down on the table next to his plate. "Yes, Sarah?"

"I was just wondering if you'd seen an old book of mine. I read it all the time right after Toby was born. It was called _The Labyrinth_ , and it had a red leather cover."

"No," he said slowly, lifting his fork to his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, wiped his mouth with his napkin. "I don't remember any book like that, but I do remember you carrying around a little leather journal all the time that you used to write in. You never went anywhere without that book, and the one time I asked you about it, you gave me this mysterious little smile and told me it was a secret. It was kind of a rough time in your teenage years, so I didn't push the issue."

I felt as though my chest was compressing, forcing all of the air from my lungs. A journal?

Was it so unreasonable that a dream I'd had ten years ago was anchored in a diary? Had I created the entire narrative? A dream that had shattered upon completion, leaving a single shard, buried in the flesh of my innermost self and waiting, aging and maturing with me, twisting itself into something far darker and more wicked than its harmless predecessor. Dreams like those can't come true.

But somehow, they are.

After dinner, I dried dishes for Karen while she washed. It's the only kitchen help that she will accept, so I took the pots and plates and cups from her, dried them, stacked them neatly on the counter for her.

"Don't worry about Toby," she said, seemingly apropos of nothing. "He's been moody lately, but I think he's been having trouble with the adjustment into summer. Routine is good for him, and now he's bored and he doesn't see any of the other kids. I think he has trouble making friends. He never has any little boys over to play. I know he's not always very polite to you, but it's good for him to see you. I think he'll thaw out over time. He loves you very much, you know?"

"He does?" I asked, surprised, wiping out the moisture on the inside of a water glass.

"He does. He has these irrational fears. Just last night he ran into our room, crying, and he said you were in terrible trouble. It's funny - I was just telling you about how the nightmares had stopped, and here they might be starting up again. Oh! How silly of me, I completely forgot! Did you ever end up seeing someone over your sleeping problems?"

"Yes. It wasn't very helpful."

"First meetings with therapists often feel that way," Karen said, laying a water-pruned hand on my shoulder. "You should give it another try if you're still having trouble. You do look a bit sickly."

"Karen," I said suddenly, "I hate to ask, but do you have anything that will help with sleep?"

She looked thoughtful. "Well, I shouldn't, but - here, it won't hurt if you just try it once or twice. One recipe for dreamless sleep, coming right up." She came back with an orange prescription bottle, popped the cap, tipped two little pills into her hand. Slipping them into a small ziplock bag, she handed them to me. "Just take one, don't take them both or you'll never wake back up."

She laughed as she said it, but a chill ran down my spine, rocketed back up to settle in my chest.

Toby didn't say goodbye to me when I left, but I saw him watching from his bedroom window as I unlocked my car. When my eyes met his, he waved at me, then let the curtain drop.

* * *

By the time I returned to our apartment, Jen was already in her bedroom. I could see that the light was still on, illuminating the crack along the floor, but I didn't disturb her. I was giddy at the prospect of getting some sleep, of clearing the cobwebs out of my brain that my thoughts kept getting stuck on. A night of solid sleep might even help with the hallucinations I've been having, and after the imaginary robbery and attempted murder I'd lived through yesterday, I was more than eager to see them end.

I stood over the kitchen sink, filled a glass with tepid water, pulled the ziplock from my pocket and picked out one of the pills. I set it on my palm and looked at it.

"I'm counting on you," I whispered to it, and then I popped it into my mouth, washed it down with water, and climbed into bed.

Sleep descended on me, rapidly and without warning.

* * *

He appears slowly, brushing the vestiges of the shadows from his shoulders. He wears a long black cloak of leather that drapes over his body. The collar is high, rises around his face.

"Your presence here is oddly strong, Sarah," he says, and his gaze is evaluating. I can read his thoughts clearly in his eyes.

I don't answer. We are standing on cold, barren ground the color of dead leaves. I cannot see far in any direction, but as far as I can see, this place is featureless. The moon hangs, low and pendulous above us, nearly full.

"Did you enjoy yourself the last time we met?"

He knows that I did, probably also knows that it has been the only thing I can think about, a deluge of intrusive thoughts that mercilessly shred away at what little sanity I have left. The press of fingers against me. The surge of pleasure-on-pain-on-pleasure. My wrists held tightly above my head.

His strength is far greater than his willowy frame suggests. I know this now, have known it forever. It electrifies me.

The smile spreading slowly across his face is harsh and sharp, matching the rest of his preternatural features. "I see."

The haze clears and my thoughts shudder back to action.

"Why is it easier to think here than it is there?" I ask him.

"You persist in this false dichotomy. It's not as simple as real and imaginary," he says. "It is a set of scales, and the weight is shifting."

"That's impossible," I say, and then, "I went home today."

"Did you?"

"I couldn't find the book."

He does not appear surprised, but waits for me to continue. His hand rests on his hip.

"My father says he doesn't think it existed."

"Is that what he said?"

"He said I might have had a diary, but never a book."

"Are you wondering if you spoke our story into existence, Sarah?" His eyes glitter angrily. "Are you wondering if I sprang, fully formed, from the whim and daydream of a fifteen year old girl? If I am a chimera of your adolescent design?"

My tongue feels glued to the top of my mouth, thick and sluggish and useless.

"Dreams exist whether or not you choose to pluck them, my little love. _I_ existed long before your insignificant life blinked into existence. As to whether or not it's your fault that I am here with you, that is far less nebulous."

I know that I should be afraid. I know that I should remember the cuts and the bruises, that I should remember the way he was content to let me chase a simulacrum of my brother through the labyrinth over and over, that I should remember Hoggle.

One of his hands is on the hilt of a thin, curved sword that hangs at his side.

I want him to touch me.

"Where are we?" I ask, just to have something to say.

"You seem to have chosen something unfinished this time," he says, "There's a certain charm to it as is."

"Do I always choose it? Where we meet?"

"Not always, but often."

Several beats of silence. It doesn't seem to bother him, standing and staring at me, imperious tilt to his chin. He was angry a moment ago, but he is back to looking at me as if I were still a child who has said or done something particularly amusing.

"How do I shift the scales back?"

He laughs. "Don't you think it's a bit late for that?"

"Is it?" I am shot through with icy terror. "Am I going to start existing here? What's going to happen to me on the other side?"

"Don't be melodramatic," he says as his cloak whips in wind that screams through us without warning. I hug myself tightly, trembling.

"Sarah, I'll pick our next destination, shall I? You won't have to worry about buckling beneath the pressure to perform." He approaches, slowly, fluidly. His movements are so obviously alien that a sort of revulsion rises in me. I feel a strange tug beneath my ribs, but I stay here, corporeal, present.

I do not want him to touch me. I do not want to feel his breath on my skin. I do not want him to come any closer, and I back away, step by step.

An expression I do not recognize flickers across his face. "Are you cowering, Sarah? Are we back at the beginning? Have you misplaced your courage?"

I step back, knowing what I will find because I put it there. A small splash: gelid water numbs me instantly, all the way up my ankle. "Looks like there's something here after all. Are you less disappointed in me now?" I am mocking him.

His face briefly goes slack with astonishment. "Stop that, Sarah."

Savage joy flares within me as I realize I have finally managed to catch him off-guard. I take another step. I cannot feel my legs. Surprise that I am still upright is what bolsters me to go further. The water rises quickly, laps around me. It is at my knees now, at my waist. It is brackish, staining my limbs. I trail my fingers in it and watch the color leech out of them.

"Sarah, you must either come back here or go." He has a crystal in his hand, is alternating between staring intently into it and turning that gaze on me, and his eyes are frantic. I am winning, but I do not know how or why. The victory should feel hollow, but I am euphoric. I will make my escape.

" _Sarah_." My name is powerful, a prayer torn from his lips. When he says it like that, it starts a fire within me that threatens to de-ice my body even as I drag it further back into the water. It makes me want to charge up and out of the water and into his arms.

The water swirls around my chest, my hair matting along the surface. My lungs seize up. I cannot breathe, cannot think, cannot move. He is pacing where the black water begins. "Sarah, don't be obtuse."

I somehow find the strength to smile at him before I allow my body to let go, to slip beneath the surface. My mouth fills with fetid water; it trickles down my throat, freezing me from the inside-out as well as from the outside-in. I hear him cry out in rage, hear the sound of him rushing into the water, sluicing through the lapping waves.

He grabs me roughly by the shoulders, dragging my head above the surface. "Stupid little girl," he says, his voice thick with fear and anger, "Pretty little imbecile." One arm braces my frozen body against his, pressing our hips together, and the other holds the back of my head, pressing my cheek against his shoulder, supporting it. He has discarded his cloak and his white shirt has gone transparent, plastered to his lean chest. The corded muscles in his arms stand out as he lifts me. He offers no body heat.

"What is keeping you Underground?" he chokes, dragging me to shore, "You should have gone by now. It is not your time."

But I fall away, unresponsive, unwilling or unable to stand on my own, start to drift from him in the shallows. My muscles won't obey. He curses, closes his hand painfully around my wrist, yanks me closer. " _Damn_ it, Sarah. _Stop_."

My world is tilting sideways. There is water in my mouth, gagging me. My lungs won't work. My vision is blurring but I can still see desperation in his eyes and the hard set of his mouth, blond hair plastered to his head. He doesn't know what to do. His kind do not normally concern themselves with death.

This is how I return.

* * *

Screaming.

It is screaming that wakes me, screaming and bright flashing lights and sirens.

Jen is knelt beside me, holding my face up and out of the water, and she is screaming.

I cannot make out the words, but they seem to mostly be my name, over and over. Tears are running unchecked down her cheeks as she tries to drag me out further, but then the professionals step in.

I cannot breathe. Someone turns me gently onto my side and I vomit up an unending fountain of foul-smelling water. The river has rinsed the makeup from my arms. The paramedics take a look at my wrist, my forearm, my hands, my shoulder. They exchange looks. My heart is beating very slowly, crawling along. I am wrapped in a rough blanket, loaded onto a stretcher.

Jen follows me into the ambulance. Her hand is cold in mine, and mine is ice in hers. There is no warmth between us, we two shivering bodies. She sobs and sobs, sits beside me as we ride to the hospital.

What I understand is this: my sleep was not dreamless.

What I understand is this: the sleeping pill trapped me there with him.

What I understand is this: I walked into the river and Jen pulled me out.

What I understand is this: he could not have saved me alone.

What I understand is this: his power over me is not absolute.


	13. Masks

I drift in and out of darkness.

My body is warm and dry. My head rests on a damp pillow. The pillowcase smells like lakewater. My hair clings wetly to my skin.

My eyelids are too heavy to hold open for more than a few seconds. I am an invalid in this bed, weighed down by each useless limb.

My throat hurts.

Jen, holding a blanket tightly around her shoulders, talks animatedly with a nurse. She gesticulates wildly, indicating her shoulder, her arm, her elbow, her wrist. I can hear snatches from her conversation, but I don't need to overhear to know what she is saying.

I am a danger to myself.

I drift out; I drift back in.

Karen is gently brushing my hair from my forehead. Her fingers are warm against my skin, and I can feel a tremor in them every so often. I am oddly touched. I know that Karen likes me just fine, that she and I have demolished the fraught evil-stepmother archetype that I'd built around her after my mother left and she showed up, but I had still never really considered her a mother.

"Can we sit her up?" she asks someone. "I just want to comb out her hair."

Someone says no, not right now. She takes my hand in hers. I can feel the cool band of her wedding ring.

Soft beeping in the silence.

Toby stands behind her. I know because I manage to open my eyes for just a second and see him. Karen, who has been watching my face, begins to cry. I squeeze her hand, and she just cries harder.

When Karen leaves to go get something hot to drink from the hospital cafeteria, Toby draws close.

"I told you not to do it," he says, leaning toward my ear. "I told you not to look for him."

I want to tell him that I wasn't trying to find him when I almost drowned. I was trying to escape him. My mouth won't work.

"Don't be so stupid," he whispers as Karen returns, heralded by the sharp click of her heels on the floor, and I can hear the tears clogging his voice, too.

I drift out; I drift back in.

There is a single vase on the counter, and in the vase there is a gorgeous display of peonies, white and pink, full and fat, sprouting out of a generous spray of baby's breath. I know that it is from Esther, and it makes me smile to think that she has forgiven me enough to send a little joke about the Johnson-Peony wedding.

I feel well enough to go find the card, and lift my arm to toss off the covers only to find my range of motion severely limited. There are strong, soft leather cuffs around my wrists and my ankles. In a sudden panic, I yank at them, and the force of it makes the bed clang.

"This is closer to what I had in mind," he says, running a gloved finger along an ankle cuff. His grin is predatory, voracious, splitting his face wide open to reveal all of his teeth.

A nurse walked briskly into the room. "Sarah Williams," she said with a smile.

"I don't like this," I said, pulling at my restraints.

He lasciviously cocks an eyebrow at me.

"Sorry, honey, but until we can verify that you're not a danger to yourself, they have to stay on. It won't be long. We just have to fix you up, but you'll be right as rain soon." She bustled around the room.

"I'm okay," I said, "Please let me out."

"We have you on a temporary psychiatric hold, Miss Williams."

"I'll be good," I babbled pitifully, "I was only sleepwalking. I didn't know what was happening. I'm not a danger to myself, I just took a sleeping pill that was a little bit too powerful."

"It doesn't matter whether you're good or bad, Sarah," he says. "Completely immaterial."

"I'm sorry, honey, but we're worried about the prior cuts and bruises on you." I saw her catch the way my eyes had shifted from her to him and back to her, saw her quickly glance over to see nothing there. I saw nothing there, either, now that he'd gone again. "Do you self-harm? Are you in trouble?"

I knew how damning the marks on my body were and was painfully aware of how unbelievable any explanation I might offer would sound, so I sank into defeated silence as she checked her chart.

"Can I see the card that came with the flowers?"

She looked up, delighted to hear something other than pleading for freedom from me. "Absolutely. Let me grab it for you." Plucking it from the display, she placed it into my hand.

" _25 and almost both feet in the grave - you could have just called in sick to work if you weren't feeling better! Recuperate and come back. We need you._ " Esther had signed it and so had Nicole.

The intern's name is Nicole.

I heaved a little sigh, feeling hysteria building inside my chest (Nicole! What a normal name!) and tried to balance it on the rail on the side of the bed, but it fluttered to the floor.

I drifted out; I drifted in.

Jen came in over her lunch break, wringing her hands. "I feel like this is all my fault," she said, finally, looking anywhere but at me. "I should have just brought you here to begin with."

"None of it is your fault," I said gently, "None of it should have been your responsibility. And you're the one who pulled me out of the water, so you should be congratulating yourself instead of condemning. It's my own fault."

She looked up, her eyes red-rimmed. "They sent me home from work after lunch, gave me the rest of the day off. I couldn't concentrate." A soft little laugh-sob. "When I saw you walk into the water and then just get pulled under, my heart stopped. I should never have let you get that far. I should have caught you sooner - when you walked out of the apartment. And when I found you and pulled you out of the water, your eyes were open and empty and I thought you were already dead." Another laugh-sob hybrid, this one verging on the hysterical. She sniffled, brought her sleeve up to wipe her eyes.

Bending at my cuffed wrist, I pointed out the tissues on the counter, and she nodded gratefully, pulled one from the box, blew her nose. "The weirdest thing, Sarah, is that you walked in backwards. You walked right up to the edge, then you turned around and stood there, swaying, for ages. It gave me the creeps, but I thought you'd just turn around and walk back, and that would be that. And then finally you took a step backwards and just kept going until you disappeared. I almost didn't make it to you in time."

I think of the way that he said _Sarah_ just before he chased me into the water, the roughness of his voice.

I think of the coincidence, that Jen should pull me from beneath the surface on this side as he did on that side.

I wonder about the nature of reality. If Jen had not been there, would I have died even as he held me there in the shallows? If he had not been there, would Jen have pulled a corpse from the river?

 _a set of scales and the weight is shifting_

"I'm really sorry about all of this," she said, indicating the restraints. I lifted a shoulder, let it fall. "I didn't realize they'd turn you into a prisoner. I just thought you should get whatever help they can give you. I can't do it, Sarah. I'm a friend, but I'm not a therapist, and I don't know how to get through to you."

"You don't have to get through to me. It is what it is, and now I'll just stay here until they let me go. Safest place for me, probably."

"I thought you'd be mad," she said. I shook my head.

"I don't feel anything at all."

I continue like this, drifting in and out of consciousness all day. Something that they have dripped into my veins is making me lethargic, lifeless. The cuffs on my wrists shield the bruising from most of my visitors' eyes, though the only people who cross the threshold to enter my dark, quiet room are Jen and Karen, with Toby in tow.

Karen came back in the afternoon, without Toby. She sat down by my bedside and flipped through a magazine while I pretended to sleep. Eventually my will gave out, and I yawned, turned my head, saw her watching me over the glossy pages.

"Hi, Karen," I said lamely. Her eyes filled with tears again. "Come on, Karen, don't do that." She reached over, laid her hand against the side of my face. "Everything's okay."

"Did you take one of my pills?" she asked. Guilt was etched into her features, saturating the tears that rolled slowly down her cheeks to fall onto the sheets.

"Yes," I said, "but-"

She bent, hugging me tightly, her thin frame wracked with sobs.

"But this isn't your fault!"

"It was my prescription medication and I should never have given it to you."

"Karen," I said, my voice muffled in her shoulder, "It wasn't the pill that made this happen. I was sleepwalking long before I took the pill, Jen could tell you that."

"And what if Jen hadn't been there?" Fresh tears dropped onto my pillow.

"Don't think about that, Karen. Jen was there, and I'm all right, and that's what matters."

"Why do they have you tied to the bed?" she asked, straightening up, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. "What's wrong with your arms?" Her eyes raked across the network of crisscrossing thorn-scars.

"Hazards of a florist's job," I said with what I hoped was a convincing half-smile, and tried to reposition my arms so that the wrist cuffs were completely obscuring the bruises beneath. "Rosebushes are nasty little things when you get caught on them. The nurses won't believe me, though, and they seem to think my accident was a suicide attempt, so all things considered, it does look pretty bad."

She just looked at me for a minute, and then sighed. "Well, Sarah, you're alive, but your hair is a mess. I brought a brush for you. Do you mind?"

"Please!" I said, sliding the shackles forward and pulling my body up into a sitting position in the bed. Karen settled in behind me and began gently working the tangles out of my dirty, matted hair from the ends up, and by the time she had finished, the nurse was coming around again. Karen braided my hair from high at the crown of my head all the way down my back.

"I don't have a tie for it," she said.

"It's all right," I replied, "I'm not going to be moving much, so it will probably stay in until you get here tomorrow to rebraid it."

When she left, I listened for the clacking of her heels down the hallway until they, too, were gone.

* * *

The sunlight slowly faded from the one tiny window in the white-washed hospital room. My nurse popped in one more time, and I thought I would ask.

"This might sound a little crazy, but do you think I could have some coffee?"

She looked at me. "Oh, honey, I don't think so. You should get some sleep."

"I don't think I'm going to sleep tonight," I said. "I'm not tired, and I've been napping here all day. But I'd really like some coffee."

"I could bring you some water."

"Could you bring me water with caffeine in it?" I asked her, sharp edge to my voice. It was the wrong move. The corners of her mouth turned down.

"The patient is displaying sleep avoidance behavior. Recommend low dose propofol."

"What?" I was enveloped in full-blown panic. "No! Don't put me under! Don't put me to sleep!"

"Don't worry, honey," she said, although I found her smile anything but reassuring. "Just relax. It will be fine. You'll feel much better after a good night's sleep."

"If you put me to sleep, I won't be able to get back out!" I cried. I pulled at each restraint with all of the strength I had in my body, praying that just one of them would give a little bit, fighting for my escape. "Please, I'll go to sleep! I'll do it myself! Let me go naturally!"

She filled a syringe, tapped it, squirted out the air bubble, and injected it into my IV port.

All of my restraints went slack immediately, and before I had time to register my consciousness fading out-

* * *

The room is cavernous, gorgeous, hewn entirely from gold-veined marble, brightly lit by sparkling chandeliers that throw off prismatic bursts of light in every direction. It is crowded with masked revelers in revealing dress, skirts swirling, the perimeter of the room lined with low tables and glass chairs. The music sends goosebumps racing up my arms.

In my hand, I hold a mask. It is the shape and the color of outstretched dove wings. I loop it around the back of my head, pressing it against my face where it sits as though it had been molded specifically for my features.

Beside me, a staircase runs up to a dais, and at the back of the dais, against the wall, hang velvet curtains of midnight blue. Some are still pulled back to reveal the alcoves they shelter, and some hang loose across the openings, concealing all manner of debauchery. I take several steps up the stairs, to stop before one of the many full-length mirrors that give the illusion of never-ending size to the already enormous room.

I catch my breath, and then laugh, throwing my head back. I wear a black dress, ruched at the hip, then flaring to hang loosely around my legs. The top is off-the-shoulder, running just along the swell of my breasts, and as I turn to examine the back of the dress I discover that there isn't one, not really. The dress plunges to a dangerously low peak just past the small of my back. My entire back is exposed, a panel of smooth white skin that stretches around to my sides. My hair waterfalls in loose curls over one of my shoulders, shepherded by a thin braid around the crown of my head that is shot through with silver filigree. My arms are encased in elbow-length black satin gloves. The bruises and exhaustion are erased from my body and mind. I have become a blank canvas on which he paints.

I ascend the rest of the staircase to pause overlooking the room with the curtained alcoves as my backdrop. I remember the last time something like this happened, and look very carefully at the outer edges of the room, trying to see a shimmer, or a reflection, or any strange distortion at all, and then I turn my attention to the crowd. It is full of strangers, but the anonymity of the mask I have been given grants me strength, heart, and mysterious smile, and when a young dark-haired man with soulful brown eyes peeking through a forest green mask offers me his hand without a word, I take it, also without a word.

I let him lead me down the steps and into the crowd, but soon discover that I have no muscle memory for this, that just because I am here does not mean that I understand how to dance. Slightly disappointed but smiling, I excuse myself from the dance - he presses a chaste kiss to my hand - and watch as he approaches a young woman reclining in a chair at the outskirts of the dance, recruits her to join him.

A woman in a scarlet dress with a plunging neckline offers me a flute of something red and bubbly. I take one from her, exchanging nods, and she disappears into the crowd. There is no speaking here, all communication in stolen glances and meaningful looks, and it lulls me into relaxation. My eyes scan the crowd some more, for of course I know who I am looking for, and I tilt the flute at my lips. It is heady and alcoholic, enough to make me gasp after I take my first sip, but also effervescent and fruity and sweet.

I move every few minutes, gracefully turning down would-be dance partners with a careless flick of my hand and a calculated smile, and after a while, fewer men approach me. A silver-clad woman divests herself of the crowd just in front of me, places a gloved hand by my elbow, leans in to whisper in my ear. I see the man she has just abandoned staring at us intently, and she slides the hand to my waist, touching the exposed skin where my dress cuts away, breathes hotly against my neck, smiles suggestively.

Lifting the glass to my lips, I drain it, smile back at her, let her intertwine our arms and lead me up the stairs. I feel eyes on us and shrink from the attention, disentangle myself, try to disappear back into the crowd as she continues, undaunted, looking for someone else to prey upon.

I catch a glimpse of blond thistledown hair and I know immediately that it is him. A playful giggle bubbles up in my throat as the drink takes effect. I am not afraid of him, not here. I will play cat and mouse with him, but this time, I have the upper hand. He does not yet know that I am here.

He suspects it, the way he whips restlessly through the crowd, the way his eyes dart across faces. He is expecting me and he is searching for me, but he has not found me, and I am filled with exhilaration as I move to keep bodies between us at all times. The music swells, crescendos; I take another glass from a golden platter and drink deeply from it, effervescence tickling my nose. My lips are red and my eyes are green and he is across the room, looking for me but he has not yet found me.

I duck into an alcove, laughing. There is a couple here already, pressing kisses to exposed skin, and one of them reaches for me so I pull the curtains wide, still laughing, my head thrown back, my hair sliding past my shoulder to brush against the bare skin of my back. I feel alive for the first time that I can remember.

He glances up at the commotion as the crowd around me bursts into raucous cackling at the exposed tryst. I am not sure if his eyes meet mine in the ensuing chaos, but I bring a hand up to steady the mask on my face and I slip easily between bodies. Self-control is not one of my virtues, and neither is patience, so I wriggle through a cluster of dancers to throw a quick glance to where he last was, and as I emerge from the densest area, I come face-to-face with a pair of blue eyes staring out from a horned mask, asymmetric pupils blown wide (and wider) in surprise.

Overwhelming relief is written on what little of his face I can see, and his arm reaches out for me, but I am too quick on my feet. I disappear back into the swirling crowd.

Silence descends. Silence and stillness. Time has ground to a halt, here in the ballroom, and I am outside of time, or maybe they are outside of time, but the last step I took was half a beat after he stopped everyone else, and the click of one heel against the marble floor echoes through the eerily quiet room.

I ease out of my heels, hang them from my fingers, tiptoe across the floor, through the bodies, my heart beating. I am not afraid, I am breathless with anticipation. I do not know what he will say when he catches me, but I know that he will, for he does not play fair. After all, he is reordering time simply to cheat in the chase.

His arms encircle me from behind, startling me so badly that I jump and make a small noise of surprise, which proceeds to reverberate off of the walls in this timeless place.

"You would hide from me after I spun this dream for you?" His hands rest at my waist, his lips touch the spot where my neck slopes down to my shoulders, and I feel them smile against my skin as I shiver.

"It's an outdated fantasy," I say, turning in his arms, "and I don't know how to dance. But it is clearly well-intentioned."

He wears a long, impeccably tailored coat jacket, a ruffled shirt, a pair of pants, heeled black boots. It reminds me powerfully of the last time we were here in each other's arms, except that this time his coat and pants are charcoal-grey rather than royal blue.

The music starts again, the dancers resume their natural, graceful movements around us. I drop my shoes to the floor, ease my feet back into them.

"I ask that you not destroy it with one of the chairs again," he murmurs, pressing a kiss to my scalp, burying his face in my hair, "I spent quite a long time crafting it from an old dream of yours."

"How very thoughtful of you." He smells like pine needles and soap, and I am surprised by the ordinariness of the scent. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this odd semblance of normality.

"I wondered if you would come," he says haltingly. Gloves ghost along my back. None of the dancers pay our embrace any attention, and I wonder if it is because he is their ruler, creator and god. "The last time we met, things took an unsettling turn."

"Yes," I say, "That was unintentional. And unfortunate."

"Was it unintentional that you would have drowned yourself rather than be near me?" he asks. I am taken aback by the vulnerability in the forwardness of the question.

"I didn't think it would go so far. I drugged myself to get to sleep because I thought maybe it would help me… my inability to sleep was interfering with my life. But I think it was the pill that made it hard to cross back over."

"You took something to help you sleep?"

"I've been given something tonight, too. To put me to sleep, I mean."

"Been given something?" he repeats, confused.

"I'm in the hospital, Jareth," I say, and my heart thrills to the unconscious tightening of his arms around me when I say his name. "I walked into the river last night and almost drowned. My roommate pulled me out, and now I'm being kept at the hospital because they've seen the marks on my arms and they think that I'm a danger to myself."

I feel the shifting of musculature in his neck that indicates a smile. "You certainly are a danger to yourself, Sarah. My lovely little fool." He tugs me out into the thick of the dancers, but I resist.

"I told you, I don't know how to dance."

"You don't have to dance," he says, "just put your arms here." And he places them around his neck, and I nestle my head into the hollow between his shoulder and his neck. "Now just step with me, and you will have mastered the appearance of proficiency, or at least of competency. Appearance is all that matters here. Everything is skin-deep."

We turn slowly, there at the epicenter of the room, gowns and coats rustling all around us.

"You are delectable tonight in your mask and gown."

It elicits a peal of laughter from me. "You chose it, didn't you?"

"Why, yes," he says, "I did. And my congratulations are well-deserved for a job well done."

"Did you even make the dream breakable?"

"Are you going to try to break it?"

"I don't think I can," I say, "I'm in an artificial sleep."

"It's quite all right," he says, "You won't be able to flee into icy waters here. It's made of your dreams, but I shaped it with great care. You aren't capable of changing my creation to suit your capricious and ill-conceived whims." But there is no real reprove in his voice.

"Jareth?"

"Yes, love?" he says with my head tucked beneath his chin.

"Why this dream? Why now?"

There is a long pause where we hold each other, turning in place.

"Our last meeting got out of hand," he says, finally. "I thought a respite might be in order, if we were fortunate enough to be fated to meet again."

"This doesn't mean I trust you." I feel his answering chuckle rumble in his chest.

I don't want to admit to him how much I like the gift he's given me, even without any innate ability to dance. One of his hands trails up and then down my spine, over and over, and the other rests warmly at the small of my back. I almost feel as though I could fall asleep here, in his arms, turning like the centerpiece of a music box, around and around.

"I wondered if I might have lost you," he says, so quietly I'm not sure I heard it correctly.

I don't respond. His breath rustles my hair, tickling my scalp.

He nudges my chin up toward him with his hand, and I meet his lips with mine. It is a kiss that is startlingly normal in its gentleness, in the warmth of his hand at my waist, tracing around to return to the bare skin at the small of my back, to draw me closer.

Emboldened, I slip the fingers of one hand up into his hair. I imagine that it is soft but coarse as it trails through my gloves, and then I bring my hand around to run it along his jawline. It might be my imagination, but I think I briefly feel a tremor there before he catches my bottom lip between his teeth, exquisitely gentle, then he deepens the kiss, angling his head. I part my lips, yielding to the pressure of his mouth.

An expanding in my chest, a low moan in my throat, his hair against my face.

We slowly pull apart, aware of the hush spreading through the room.

It seems as though everyone is watching us, all of the revelers, eyes unreadable through their masks, nothing concrete in the set of their mouths. Embarrassment flushes pink in my cheeks all the way down to my chest, and I turn my face in toward him, settling against his shoulder. Muffled whispers start up, blanketing the room in sibilance and breathiness.

He senses my discomfort, leads me to an alcove, presents me with a plate of sparkling truffles and petit fours. I sink gratefully into the seat that curves around the sides of the little alcove as he draws the curtains, conjures a crystal, sets it on the table where it emits soft white light. I untie my mask, set it down on the table, and he follows suit.

His face is so impossibly beautiful in its otherness. I recall the feeling of his jawline beneath my hand.

"Champagne truffle," he says as I pick up the sugar-dusted candy. His eyes watch me intently.

"If I eat it, do I become trapped in your bubble forever?" I ask him, teasing.

"I believe those were pomegranate seeds," he says, grinning crookedly. "I can arrange for you to have some if you'd like. But no," he takes the candy from my fingers, my gloves now spotted with sugar, holds it to my lips. "It will not bind you to this side. It may draw out your time here tonight, but I sense that you are not impatient to return."

I part my lips to him for the second time tonight, allow him to place the truffle on my tongue. I bite through the white chocolate shell, and the filling bursts across my tongue, raspberry and just a hint of dry champagne. It is nearly as heady as the drink from the elegant glass flutes.

He reaches for my ankle where it peeks from below the table, beneath my skirt, draws it into his lap. He runs his finger along the inside of the shoe, making me wriggle, before easing it off and setting it on the seat beside him. His fingers press into the sole of my foot, up the arch, and a little raspberry-scented groan of pleasure escapes my sugar-dusted lips.

He looks up at me, all hooded eyes and hinted smile in the corners of his mouth, traces his fingertips up to my ankle. I rest my head back against the wall and close my eyes, a little bit tipsy, sparks shooting up my legs to my core. Warm fingertips explore up my calf, knead the muscle there, trail along to the back of my knee.

"Why is it so different here?"

"I aim to please," he says. The brush of his fingers at the back of my knee makes me feel pliable, putty in his capable hands. "Your other dreams were not created. They simply were."

"Is it real?" I ask him as he returns his attention to my calf, gentle press and release to loosen the tight muscles. Behind my eyelids, it is safe and dark; the touch of his gloves on my skin soothes the itch of the nearness of him.

He laughs at me, but it is kinder, gentler, quieter than usual. "Always the same question, Sarah. Always the wrong one."

My eyes open lazily to find him watching me, his gaze nearly indecipherable in the strange softness of his face. The alcove blankets us in quietude.

"Did you stop time again?" The question breaks loud against the absence of sound.

"Not exactly."

He replaces my shoe with infinite care, then opens the curtains, and the room is completely empty. No trace of the hundreds of masked partygoers in their finery, no final strains of music dying away. Just the soft tinkling of the swaying chandeliers that fleck the room with light.

I take his offered hand, and we take the stairs slowly, walk through the center of the ballroom. Half-empty glasses are gathered on all of the tables, catching and tossing the light. Discarded masks litter the room, velvet and glitter and ribbons curling off along the floor. I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror and we are perfect, both of us all angles, jawlines and cheekbones, sloping planes of our bodies turned toward each other, long blond hair and coal-black curls, all blue eyes and green eyes and black-gloved hand in black-gloved hand.

We were made for each other.

He made us for each other. Or did I?

I turn to him to ask a question that has not yet filtered its way down from my mind to my sugared lips, and he is offering me something, pressing it into my hand.

It is the rose, deep vermilion petals unfurled in full and flawless bloom, diamond edges catching and refracting the light. I close my fingers around it, and one of the thorns slices through the glove to prick my finger.

A single drop of my blood slithers through the glove, falls, shatters starkly crimson on the white marble floor. Time slows; he is gripping my hand tightly as the dream-bubble begins to implode. He throws his jacket over my shoulders, curls his body around me protectively as shards of dreamglass fly in at us from every direction. The last thing I see is the stormy blue determination of his eyes, he is snarling _not yet_ , one of the fragments slices deep into my calf, searing pain as I feel him whisk me away-

* * *

The warm flow of blood over my leg wets the sheets below me. The orange glow of sunrise is just beginning to stream in through the little window, bathing the room in warm colors. With effort, I shift myself, reach for the button to call the nurse. My mouth is dry and cottony, my mind completely empty, my eyes unfocused. I reach the length of the restraint and pull harder, straining to reach the button.

A single bead of blood shines wetly on my fingertip.

The nurse came running to find me bleeding profusely into the sheets, wild-eyed and angry, each of the cuffs cutting unforgivingly into my skin as I struggled.

"How did this happen?" She stared in disbelief at the long, thin, clean cut, at the darkly gleaming blood staining formerly clean sheets in the half-light of morning.

My braid was coming undone, kinked waves streaming darkly over my white pillow.

She taped my leg up, bandaging it, checked the restraints. "Impossible," I heard her mutter, shaking her head. "Impossible."

When she left the room, I rattled the cuffs against the bed, squirming and twisting, longing to return to freedom, to a bright white ballroom with an otherworldly king all my own, building rage and resentment to a howling scream in my chest.


	14. Eclipse

**Author's Note:** Okay. So. This is the final chapter, and that may have kind of blindsided you if you've been following along, because I can't list how many chapters are planned for the work here on ffn. I had a lot to say about this and the process in general over on AO3; head over there if you want to see really ramble-y author's notes that may or may not actually add anything to the experience (username is still Exulansist) - and as an additional bonus, you can comment there if you're looking for some answers because it is easy for me to reply, or you can PM here if you have an account. I'm here for you. I have a lot of feelings and I'm happy to talk about them, and I am also happy to talk about yours. With no further ado...

* * *

 _Impossible_ , they keep saying, _impossible_.

It makes me want to scream.

A little harem of nurses, all gathered 'round my bedside, staring dispassionately at me where I cry and sweat and writhe, rubbing my skin off even against the padding on the inside of the ties of the restraints that hold me here. When I have to use the bathroom, they unclip me slowly, send me with an escort with a too-tight hand on my arm, the indignity charring my insides. When I ask for food or drink, they nod, patronize me, spoon-feed me tasteless green jello or tapioca pudding, hold a plastic cup of stale-tasting water to my parched lips.

The first nurse to come to my aid was followed by several more, flitting in and out of the room, distressed. Clucking like hens, I think unkindly. I know they are just following orders.

We are all of us just following orders.

The room, once burnished in amber, brightened and whitened until it reached right back around to clinical sterility. My neck itched, but I could not reach to scratch it. And still, _impossible_.

Drawn together, they stared at the bedside tray. I was exhausted by the slackness of their faces, the empty wrinkling of their brows. The nurse who I thought of as mine, the one who trickled liquid sleep into my veins, held something up to the light. It reflected a flash of sunlight into my eyes, blinding me.

"But how could she possibly have-?"

It was a scalpel, razor-thin, razor-sharp, and its wicked edge was coated in blood.

"She was under," protested my nurse, "I put her under deep sedation. This clearly brought her out of it. She couldn't have brought _herself_ out of it. It just doesn't make any sense."

They murmur amongst themselves. I wonder if the scalpel was lying in a pool of blood. I think of the touch of his lips, lie still, try to appear uninterested.

"There just isn't any way she could have done this to herself!" she said, her voice rising above the fray.

"Who was on duty last night?"

Another devolution into hushed whispers. I frowned. I wanted them all to go away. The flowers in the vase stooped slightly under their own weight.

The nurse set the scalpel down, carefully. "She was immobilized. She's still immobilized."

I glared at her. "Just because you think I'm crazy does not mean it doesn't make me angry when you talk about me like I'm not in the room."

Her face softened, just a little bit, as the half-halo of personnel behind her went quiet. "You didn't do this to yourself, did you?"

"Of course not," I sighed, and moved my arms to the full extent of their motion. The straps went taut. "I can't even scratch where my neck itches. Do you really think that I let myself out, went to carve a slice in my leg, somehow tied myself back in and then called you? Why would I do that?"

I hoped that I sounded lucid, rational, because I couldn't quite think clearly.

"Did you see who did it to you?" she asked.

"No. When I woke up, I was bleeding, so I called you. No one was in the room."

"We don't keep surgical tools in these rooms, anyway," she murmurs to her audience of peers. "I just don't understand how it happened."

 _Impossible_.

By the time my mind snapped, she had injected the sedative before I realized that the hoarse screaming was my own.

* * *

I open my eyes to find my hand in his. He has peeled off the glove to examine my finger. The prick of the thorn has diminished. His tongue darts out to taste the crimson smear on his lips.

"Your kind have a story," he says, utterly without preamble. "A princess succumbs to a forever-sleep at the prick of a spindle, only to be revived by true love's kiss. A bit cloying."

I blink sleep from my eyes. I am lying, prone, across a bed. He sits at the edge, one long leg folded neatly beneath him. The sky looms large above me, and in it, millions of stars surround the full, round moon. The moon is unsettling, enormous; it gives me vertigo, makes the room - earth? - spin, kickstarts my adrenaline. The sky is falling.

The warmth of the gift-dream is gone.

"I suppose that makes you both the villain and the prince," I say. "Doesn't speak very highly of my discretion in choosing a lover, does it?"

"Oh, Sarah," he says, his answering grin wild and wicked. "No one would accuse you of having been wise in your selection. Courageous, perhaps, but never wise."

He has removed my shoes. I bury my toes in the gathers of the coverlet.

"I'm not sure I chose you," I counter.

He has shed his formal coat. The ruffled shirt hangs open at his breast. Moonlight gleams whitely off of his skin.

"We aren't lovers yet," he says in return, and his eyes burn fiercely.

"I'm not even convinced that you woke me," I say.

"I kissed away blood drawn by the thorn of my rose, and you came back to me."

"Coincidence. They put me to sleep on the other side. They think I'm crazy."

"Your tenuous grasp on sanity is slipping," he says. He takes my other hand, lifts it from where it sprawls across the red sheets. His fingers pinch at the tip of the glove, just where my index finger ends, and he gives it one tug. It slides fluidly from my arm, baring my skin.

My arm is unmarked, flawless.

"Why erase my scars now?" I ask him. "Can't you stand seeing what you've done to me?"

"You say that as if you're blameless. You are the chief architect of many of the places we've visited." He strokes down the length of my arm, soothing my shivering. "You've grown wild and dangerous, and the labyrinth has simply responded accordingly."

Everywhere he touches, he leaves livid shadow marks on my skin. Inside, I ignite. A clenching in my core.

"Do you want me to touch you, Sarah?"

I know that the answer should be - has to be - no, but his lips brush mine, dragging the _yes_ from them as surely as if he had reached inside of my body and manipulated it himself. A different flavor of manipulation.

I reach for him as he kisses down the column of my throat, itching to bury my fingers in his hair, hold him there where I need him. A yearning to put my bare hands against his skin builds in me until I am sure I must explode, but his hands, still encased in ever-present leather gloves, close around my wrists.

I yelp; the skin there is still thin and tender even if it is not purple anymore, and then shadows ring them, dark shackles, not quite bruises.

"I did not ask if you wanted to touch me."

His voice is low and dangerous as he raises his head. My heart thumps, once, heavily. He reaches behind me to a pair of silver scarves, one at each bedpost, that he knots around my wrists, just so, spreading my arms wide like wings.

"I will need both of my hands this time," he says. I burn.

One at a time, he removes his own gloves. The process is shockingly intimate, steeped strangely in eroticism. His eyes do not leave mine as I see his hands for the first time, slender and white and unmarred, long and somehow brimming with terrible strength, as if hands could evoke such a thing as strength merely by existing. He stretches, then flexes them, compressing one and then the other into a quick fist, a smirk curling around the edges of his cruel mouth.

My arousal spirals to undiscovered heights.

A fingertip brushes along my ankle. His other hand pushes the skirt of the backless black dress still higher, so that it bunches above my knees. The feel of his skin against mine is flame and ice and electricity, trailing upward, the brush of a butterfly wing or a feather or a wisp of a cloud.

His eyes are cast downward, his lashes thick inkstrokes against the white of his face. His fingers brush the incision, just so, and I hiss in pain, hot and cold and electrified.

He smiles.

His head bends, his mouth warm and wet, his tongue lapping gently along the cut. "Do you know," he breathes against my skin, "I can taste your desire in the dream-wound." My toes curl in the blankets. "It is intoxicating."

The syllables of _intoxicating_ roll from his tongue like nothing I've ever heard. My chest heaves. All I can see is the tuft of his hair from where he bends to me, ministering to me with lips and tongue.

The fire blazing inside me is coiled up so tightly that I am beginning to be afraid, or I would be afraid if I could feel anything but him, his lips, his fingers in lazy circles on my skin.

"Do you choose me, Sarah?" he asks, laughter rippling through the question, because he knows what my answer is, what my answer has to be. I curl my hands into fists around the scarves holding me here.

"I want to touch you," I say, because it is true, because on the other side I am already tied to a bed, because I can't stand being teased. Because I refuse to give him the satisfaction of answering his question.

"Wicked thing," he breathes, scrape of teeth above my knee, the skirt bunched obscenely high on my hips. I look away from him, look up into the sky, see a shadow beginning to bite into the moon. It leadens my veins, fills them with dread.

He looks up from me, follows my frightened gaze into the sky. His smile widens. "Isn't it lovely that we should be so celebrated by the celestial bodies?"

I watch the galaxies swirl across the sky. He the umbra, I the penumbra. The moon glowing silver-blue, slowly yielding to shadow.

"Did you plan this? An eclipse?" I ask, and I am oddly short of breath, and his hands are pressing the rich fabric of my skirt still higher and his eyes are black as the night sky and blue as the morning sky and his face is still full of an untamed smile.

"I considered arrangements," he says, "I'm delighted by the symbolism of it all, heavy-handed as it may be; how fortunate for us that night skies like these are where dreams are woven." He nudges his wrist against me through the fabric, just so, watches the involuntary thrash of my hips.

" _Jareth_." A breathy intonation. I watch his eyes flick up to my face, the immediate tension in his body, the stilling of his hands against my skin. He moves upward, over the bed, over me. I remember the press of his hips on mine, but he holds himself above, apart.

Fingers circle my arm, run along the ticklish stretch of the inside of my upper arm. My skin prickles at his touch.

"I did leave two," he says. He is talking about the remaining scars, the two most recent. His lips close over my pricked finger.

"You - you told me not to leave any of myself here," I gasp. I can barely see him if I crane my neck, his hand over the knot of the scarf on my wrist. His mouth is velvet-soft. The rose's single perforation fills with ice. The sensation slowly fades as he moves back to kneel beside me.

"I told you that if you left too much of yourself behind in the labyrinth, you would find yourself lost," he says, "But Sarah, being lost in the labyrinth is one thing. I _want_ you to lose yourself to me."

His fingers tangle in the curls of my hair, and he bends again to kiss at my pulse points, tongue fluttering against them until the waves of pleasure rising within me start to make my arms tremble where they reach for him, struggling.

It is too much, and it is not enough.

His teeth close on the outer whorl of my earlobe and his lips curl at the gasp of a scream from my throat. He cups his hand over my breast, through the dress, his thumb sweeps over the bud and I am half-sobbing already, soaking wet and overwhelmed with need.

"Do you choose me, Sarah?" he breathes in my ear, and arousal rises in my chest so powerfully that I am almost nauseous with it.

But my lips are shut; I bite them there, jaw trembling, refuse to give him what he wants because he will not give me what I want, though I know that this battle is already won and I know that I am not the victor. He tugs at my hair, slides his other hand slowly along my chest, down my stomach to my abdomen. He cups his hand where the heat licks away at me, slow burn building to roaring blaze.

"Have you chosen?" he growls, and my skin blisters where his breath scorches along my skin.

In a fit of pique, craving written starkly across his face, he seizes the dress where it has gathered at my hips, yanks it roughly over my head where it remains, wrapped tightly around my arms. I am exposed, the slickness between my thighs cold where the night air caresses it. I bring my legs together, but he wedges them apart, kneels between them.

One quarter of the moon is bathed in shadow, the dark smile encroaching.

He kisses the tip of my breast, then his tongue dips into my navel, teeth nipping at my skin as he inches lower. "Choose me, Sarah," he insists.

I feel his breath on me, and I know that I have lost.

" _Yes_ ," I groan, the sibilance drawn out as his mouth descends on me, just there, there where the ache is anchored, there where my whole self shrinks to nothing. I rage at the scarves binding my arms, thrashing and struggling, and he laughs against my skin before I begin to writhe, shifting against his lips and tongue, ravenous and half-crazed, coiling more and more tightly.

His mouth is wildfire against me. His hands are on my hips, improbably strong, holding me steady and still and far from the friction I so desperately crave. " _Jareth_ ," I whimper, my throat raw. He laughs again, laps at me, relishes the dance of my body in response. I am moments from the edge, from cresting and falling in ecstasy-

He stops and I scream in despair, in frustration and anger. He laughs, low and throaty and sadistic, rocks back on his heels, watches the twitch of my restless hips as I recede from the peak I have been reaching for.

Above us, the moon has gone half-dark, the umbral curve turning light to shadow. I imagine existing on its surface, imagine running from the impending darkness, watching it gain on my heels, playful but inevitable. I think of fog, and of shadow, and of the winking out of stars in the sky.

His hand, warm and weighty at my neck. He lifts my head gently, kisses me deeply. I respond in kind, opening my mouth, opening my body to him, but with my arms restrained there is only so much contact that I am able to initiate. There, the hard length of him against me, pressed against my hip. Here, the building blaze, the slick heat.

" _Please_ ," I beg against his lips.

He reaches down between us, and I feel his hand tremble slightly as he adjusts, positioning himself.

Then, the silky slide of him against me, into me, fullness and tightness, and a ragged little intake of breath from him makes it my turn to smile even though I am moaning, long and low. His teeth worry at the skin at my neck, he draws my legs up behind him, sinks deeper. I roll my hips, angling up to meet him, and he gasps again.

My eyes cast skyward to the rapidly darkening moon, fighting its losing battle. The shadow slips further; there is only a scythe of light left curling around its edge, soon to be extinguished.

His breath comes in pants against my skin, and I relish the hint at his loss of control, the first time I have witnessed him overcome with anything ( _but for the moment when he pulled my body from the water_ ), the first time I have felt any kind of share in his power. He moves slowly, deliberately, waiting for me to protest. I twist my hips against him, feel his body shudder.

He moves his hands to mine. I tighten around him as he interlocks our fingers, skin on skin, pinning my hands more firmly to the mattress. His lips pull at mine; I give what I have left to give. I fight as hard as I can against my restraints because I want to force him to speed his tempo, want to rake my fingernails down his back, but the scarves are unyielding, if soft.

"Jareth," I sob, panting, " _Please_ , f-faster!" I am beyond shame, beyond anything but the need to enter the free fall that follows this ascension.

He rocks against me and I am nearer and nearer to paradise, the wildness within me expanding and uncurling, stretching into my furthest corners, preparing for the rush, the eruption, the surrender.

The last silver-blue crescent disappears from the moon, light is devoured by shadow, and it finally succumbs to its name and its fate, blood-red glow spreading across its face. The stars, impossibly bright.

"Come," he commands, his voice like thunder, his hand moving between us to stroke a single fingertip over my clit.

I look into his face, twisted with insatiable desire.

A drawing in: of breath, of spirit, of body, higher and higher, tighter and tighter-

I come.

 _Here I am, my face livid with blood, my body spasming against the restraints, my lungs thrusting air through my vocal cords in a primal scream (his name) as I ride through my climax, cold and empty and alone, sparks dancing behind my eyelids. Here I am, screaming until my lungs are empty and pushing up against my throat with nothing else to give, the sharp sound dying in a grating rasp, my head thrashing against the pillow._

 _The nurse sprints in, sees my dark face, my sweat-soaked body, my writhing limbs; her hands shake as she fills a syringe, trying not to look at my convulsions. She thinks that I am misbehaving, or seizing, or possibly dying, but I know that she could never possibly guess the truth of what is happening to me. As the sedative flows anew through my veins, I feel the blood drain from my face, feel my head drop back to the pillow as my the tight muscles in my neck continue to scream out, my core pulsing and pulsing as I drop back to return to the darkness, return to him._

The oversaturated, galaxy-strewn sky fills my vision again, the red moon cloaked in shadow and dangerously near. My insides are still clenching, rhythmically.

"You sent me back," I gasp. I am covered in a thin sheen of sweat. He reclines beside me, his fingers drawing lazy patterns across my ribcage. He brushes against the underside of my breast, and the flame that I'd thought extinguished leaps anew within me.

"I did." He chuckles, amused. "It was not my intention, but here you are again." He undoes the scarves at my wrists ( _they fall away_ ), and I bring my arms down around my body as my overextended shoulders twinge, shedding the rest of the black dress. I see that he has redone his pants, and flush when he catches me looking.

He hands me the edge of the red silk sheet, eyes sweeping across me one last time before I pull it up, wrap it around myself. It billows, settles gently around me in hills and valleys. I reach to him, and he finally allows me to stroke my bare fingers across his cheekbones, the curve of his lips over sharp teeth, the side of his face. I brush hair away from his face, wondering at my audacity to touch a god. For he is, isn't he?

And who am I, that I should be here in his presence, shielding my nakedness with the sheet we have just defiled?

"I want to show you something," he says. "We can wait until your legs work again." A small smile.

I want to nestle into him, feel his arms around me, but instead manage a sitting position, cinching the sheet around myself. I look around. "Does this place belong to you?"

"All places belong to me."

I wonder if he is teasing, but his face is serious.

"Where are we?"

"Nowhere in particular. One of the labyrinth's many offerings to its creator."

I cannot tell where we are, only that the ground beneath the bed is smooth and slate-tiled and stretches out quite a ways. "Did you bring me here on purpose?"

"Yes and no," he says. "The labyrinth has some mind of its own. I was distracted at our instant of departure."

I remember his arms around me, his back to the crystal shards that had rained down on us.

"Why did the bubble burst?" I ask.

"It was an oversight on my part, to allow you to shed your blood within the dream. It didn't appreciate the sacrifice," he says, and his unearthly grin shows all of his teeth. "I should have known better than to let you hold a thorned rose."

"What happened to it? The rose, I mean."

"It dissipated into the mists of time, I expect," he says, grandly. The way he says it reminds me a little bit of Jen. "It doesn't matter. More will grow in time."

Standing, he offers me his hand. I am astonished that he has not replaced his gloves, but I switch the hand that holds the sheet around me so that I can take it. Our touch is not electric, but his hand is cool and dry where it encloses mine. With his help, I slip down off of the bed ( _with shaking legs_ ) and he steadies me, leads me for what feels like forever to a staircase uncurling against a cliffside, cold and grey, reaching up to the heavens.

"Where are we going?" I ask. My legs are weak and the steep ascent is daunting.

"Up," he says simply. We climb forever, the lactic acid burning in my tired muscles so starkly different from the languorous heat that enveloped me before. Stairs and stairs and stairs ( _up and up and up_ ), and then a little stone door in the side of a stone wall.

He pushes it open with his palm, and it glides inward, frictionless and silent until it scrapes to a halt. My chest heaves, and then slowly, intentionally, I breathe deeply. Wind sweeps through the door, whistling constant and low, tugging playfully at the sheet I gather around myself.

"Through," he says now, and his hand falls to the small of my back, guides me ( _through the door_ ).

He follows me through; we are standing on a stone plateau that stretches on and on. It might be the shorn-off summit of a former mountain - it might simply be some topographical anomaly generated by the labyrinth itself. We stand, hand in hand, high above each peak and ancient tree here, looking out over our creation. I am reminded of the beginning of my adventure, ten years ago, when he took me to the window and showed me his Underground. The maze twists away before me, forever and ever, each turn familiar, seen in a dream.

My labyrinth.

* * *

In my experience, it's usually German that has the words that we lack in our English vocabulary, great unwieldy words that speak volumes more than the space they already occupy. But, if we're fair, every language has words for things that go unspoken in others.

Take French, for example. _L'appel du vide_. Literally "the appeal of the vacuum," but more commonly translated as "the call of the void." The morbid curiosity of what-if.

The moment you spend wondering what it would be like to just end it in any manner, whether fantastical or mundane. You'd never do it - but you think about it, what it would feel like to do it, knowing you could. What those last moments would look like.

My mistake was failing to understand the nature of the void. It doesn't have to be the quick yank of the steering wheel to send yourself plummeting off the cliff.

Sometimes the void is within.

* * *

I am weightless, my stomach soaring, free from the inexorable pull of gravity. He takes my hand, looks down at my face, his expression oddly soft.

It's incongruent with everything I understand to be true about him, and though I could be wrong, I don't believe that I am. And that this thought doesn't bring me back to earth gives me pause. I go on feeling weightless, bobbing at the end of a string that he has tethered to himself, and look at my hand in his.

His hand is bare, the skin cool and dry and comforting. His eyes glint.

A wave of nausea crashes over me. My feet can't hold me down to the ground. His arm slips around my waist, urges me on.

"Jareth?" I ask. My voice is small.

He quirks an eyebrow at me.

"Jareth, is something wrong?"

He looks to me very much as if he is the cat that ate the bird.

 _I am the mouse._

He looks as if he is the cat who ate the bird ( _mouse_ ) and found that the bird ( _mouse_ ) wasn't exactly what he thought it would be. In fact, I'm certain that it's disappointment drawing down the corners of his lips.

" _Jareth_ ," I urge, my hand still enclosed in his. He moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue.

"I explained it to you ten years ago," he sighs, as if impatient with me.

My heart flutters inside me like a caged animal.

 _Voices, tense and shrill, panicked._

 _"How did she get up here?!"_

 _"I don't know! I don't know! The door is always locked, she was heavily sedated, she was restrained! I don't know how she could have-"_

 _"Sarah! Sarah, come down from there! Sarah, come here, the doctors will help you, Sarah, please!" Karen's voice, thick with panic._

 _"Sarah, you don't have to go just because he tells you to." Toby is bawling, tears streaming down his face. "Don't do it, Sarah, don't let him win. It's not your fault! I'm sorry I was mean to you!"_

 _They've all burst through the little door that opens up from the stairwell onto the roof, they are all standing there, an orderly, a nurse, a doctor with a clipboard, Karen and Toby, and they are all wide-eyed, standing back, arms extending toward me, pleading._

 _Why are they pleading?_

My mouth is so dry that speaking is a burden. "What's happening to me?"

"Sarah," he says gently, and reaches over to smooth my hair away from my face. "We are on the verge of escape. Don't be afraid."

I recoil from his touch. "Afraid of what? What are you escaping from?"

A wave of vertigo - he keeps me from collapsing with the strong arm around my waist.

 _I teeter on the edge of the building. A quick glance down at my feet: my toes are pointing off the edge of the roof, my body swaying. The breeze feels so much stronger up here._

 _The thing is, I could just jump._

 _I wouldn't._

 _But I could._

 _Nothing would ever hurt again._

"Let go, Sarah," he says.

"I - you know that I can't!" My motor functions are sluggish. He holds me against himself, nips at my neck with icy lips. "Why are you doing this to me?" My tears freeze on my face. He looks outward, into the sky.

"Look," he says, "I have moved the stars for you."

I turn my face to the sky, to the moon hanging heavy and full and dark and red, and I see a rift in the sky where there is no light. I never knew darkness could be so absolute. A wordless, primitive terror mounts within me, threatening to strip me of my fragile grasp on my own mind. "Why?" I ask.

"You know why."

"What?" I cry, eyes brimming. "Jareth- no!" His name is a supplication falling from my lips, and I repeat it over and over, hoping that it will soothe him, will move him to extend mercy.

 _"I'm coming," I scream, turning toward the small group of people watching me, my family waiting on the roof with outstretched arms. "I love you! I'm coming!"_

"Sarah," he chides gently. He gathers me in a bridal carry, supporting beneath my back and my knees, and I cannot get away, utterly lack the energy to struggle. I am a feather in his arms. The scarlet silk streams off behind us, pinned to my body by his arms. "You must let them go. Stay with me."

I begin to respond when I feel an awful lurch in my stomach, a sudden prickling in my limbs, and I know that it is done.

" _No!_ " I scream, sobbing, hitting him wherever I can reach. "No, Jareth, _no! What have you done?_ "

 _Screams echo in my ears._

 _I am swan-diving off the precipice, hospital gown loose and fluttering around my body like wings. I am a dove with a broken wing, plummeting to earth to the fanfare of my own name, wailed over and over._

" _What have you done?_ " I scream again and again. " _What have you done to me? What have you done?_ "

"Precious thing," he murmurs in my ear, the sickness in my stomach something I have never known before. He ignores the pathetic assault of my fists. My ears are filled with a strange rushing. "My avenging angel. You aren't the first to fall to earth."

I can't breathe, can't see, can only hear his voice, can only feel him against me, supporting my weirdly weightless body, carrying me on. "Why?" I ask, and my voice is thick with tears.

"I want to tell you a story," he says, still moving forward, one foot in front of the next. I can hear the heels of his boots on the ground because there is nothing else to be heard. The sky is the only thing in my vision, the enormity of it, swirling galaxies and blood-red shadow-moon, the terrible rift inching ever closer. It should be impossible, that we should be approaching the rift in the sky, but I see it with my own eyes, incontrovertible albeit tear-blurred.

 _The ground grows ever closer; my arms, outstretched but insufficient to catch at the air. The wind whistles in my ears but I hear nothing but my own heartbeat, relentlessly keeping time through my breakneck descent._

"Stay with me, Sarah," he says firmly when I look up into his eyes. "If you don't stay with me, I won't be able to finish the story. You wouldn't want it to go untold."

 _Concrete pavers, snapping gown-_

He shakes me roughly. "Stay _here_ , Sarah. Nothing remains for you there." The sky overhead fills me with fatigue, exhaustion settling into my bones.

"Once," he says, his voice low and musical - how did I never notice the melody of his voice before? - "there was a little girl. The little girl was very brave, but she was also very stupid, and bravery and stupidity are often a deadly pair.

"She was dissatisfied with her lot in life, and there is a danger in dissatisfaction that she could not understand, for she was still very young. She made a wish, and with her wish, she unknowingly interrupted the natural order of things, attracting the attention of a very powerful king.

"Wishes are slippery, shrewd things, and the little girl soon found that the granting of her wish did not bring her the happiness she sought. Unfortunately, as is the way of things, wishes cannot simply be undone, so she put aside her fear and challenged the king, and he gave her an impossible task. If she could solve his labyrinth within thirteen hours, he would allow her to revoke her wish.

"The little girl was surprisingly resilient: she danced with the king and completed the task in the allotted time, and at the crucial moment, the king revealed to her that he was impressed with her tenacity and intrigued with her cleverness. He offered an alternate prize, the value of which was beyond estimation: she should stay with him and be his queen, for he had fallen in love with the girl.

"But she spurned his gift, choosing instead to return to her unremarkable life with a newfound ability to find satisfaction even in the worst situations, but there is also a danger in complacency for which she still lacked understanding. However, in the instant that the little girl refused the king's offer, she severed the last strands that held his kingdom anchored in space and time, and as his castle succumbed to the pull of the elements, her victory would have been complete if not for one single mistake."

I am cold all over, but silent, eyes closed, my cheek against a bare swath of skin on his chest. His voice is so very beautiful that I dare not interrupt. But he seems to be waiting for me to ask the question, so I run my dry tongue over my chapped lips and manage to whisper it up to him.

"What was her mistake?"

"She reached out for the bauble that the king tossed into the air at the moment of his defeat, because, after all, she was only a very little girl, and little girls have a particular susceptibility to their fantasies. The crystal fell to her fingers, but disintegrated as soon as it had brushed the first one, and then she was whisked away to her old life and thought no more about what the touch of the bauble might have meant.

"As most little girls do, she grew up into a young woman, but unlike most little girls, she had allowed a king to slip into her dreams from his own ruined world, to build himself a new castle in and through her subconscious, biding his time. He stole her away during her waking hours and during her sleeping hours, enlisting her help in rebuilding his kingdom. But because the king was living within her rather than ruling alongside her, he grew wild and ruthless, dissatisfied and vengeful, and planted those seeds in her as well, carving out a portion of her innermost being in order to make room there for himself.

"When the young woman finally discovered the king within her, he knew the time of his escape was nigh. As she had come of age, he wooed her and courted her until she had given herself over to him entirely. Finally, on the occasion of their thirteenth meeting, the king was to be freed with her and of her, come what may. At any price."

My tears pool against his skin.

"Do you understand, Sarah?"

I don't understand. I don't understand anything.

My mirror-twin, eyes turning to his in the mirror. The low wailing behind impenetrable walls. His face behind mine in the photograph, wicked smile stealing onto my lips. He, with me and in me, ten long years of waiting borne out in cruel and unthinkable tragedy. It is impossible, and yet I am falling.

It is so very cold.

"I am, as ever, your slave," he whispers in my ear. There is no answering heat from my body, no rash of goosebumps, no elevated heartbeat.

I feel nothing.

"Jareth? What will happen to us?" I ask him. I can hear his heartbeat. It has never occurred to me that he should have a heartbeat. My hair sweeps across his arm, rippling gently in the wind.

The rift is very near. I could nearly reach out and touch its edges, feel where it parts company with the sky.

"You will become the very prettiest star," he says simply, eyes sparkling like sapphires, and takes one last step: he, the void within me, bearing me into the void without-

 _The ground looms near; I close- (in on my shadow) -my eyes, tuck my head to my breast-_

I feel my body cave in on itself, and I cease to exist even as he draws me nearer still and places a kiss on my forehead, sending frost across my skin as shadows pull at us, dissolving us into the aether-

 _-starstuff-_

-nothing.


End file.
